"Open discussion and the respectful sharing of ideas"

are what universities are about if the quote from a deputy vice-chancellor of one of our local universities is correct.

I beg to differ. This is not what our local universities are about. They may have been once but they are no longer. 

The deputy vice-chancellor in question was speaking about an upcoming "Festival of Democracy and Human Rights". It should be an event to applaud. What it would appear to be is something quite different. 

If the reports are to be believed this event is apparently an attempt to provide an "antidote" to the "far right" through prescribing "trade union membership". The organisers are apparently concerned that one in four voters voted for the "far right" One Nation party in the state's Legislative Council. They like to forget there was nowhere near this percentage of voters in the lower house who were voting for the same party.

I imagine their concern is more that there is polling to suggest that One Nation voters could bring about a seismic shift at the next national election and suddenly be a serious opposition. Yes, polling suggests that. More people are openly suggesting they will vote for One Nation. 

What the government and the current Opposition are not doing is addressing the reasons there is growing support for One Nation. Much of the support is around the demand for lower levels of migration, a different tax structure and the "net zero" debate as well as a different approach to housing, health and small business.

The government is not listening to any of this. The Opposition is apparently not prepared to change their policies. The media keeps suggesting that the fiery red head who leads One Nation is some sort of dangerous renegade, another Trumpian. 

The reaction and the claim by the vice-chancellor interests me because I am well aware that there are real issues with "open discussion" at universities here. There is little "respectful sharing of ideas" in many areas. Students are not free to argue alternative views if they want to pass. I talk to students. I read their essays.

"Do you believe this?" I will ask them, "Or are you just regurgitating an idea you have been given?"

"It's what we have to say," I am told. Or, "It's what the lecturer told us." 

This is what university is now about? Follow the "correct" version if you want to pass?

Across the way from me is a mature age student in his final year. He is no fool. He had a responsible role in industry before the business he was in went into liquidation and, along with many others, he found himself unemployed and unemployable. He is working to change that but he finds himself having to write one thing while he believes another. He started out trying to raise opposing points of view in his area (counselling) and found that, while he was being given a pass mark it was just that. When he provided the acceptable answers he was given distinctions. He wondered if there was something wrong with his previous work. Yes, there was. He was not following the acceptable way of thinking. 

This man is old enough, mature enough and experienced enough to realise what is being done. He will go through the last year of his course without "rocking the boat" in order to get the piece of paper he needs. After that he can apply commonsense and world experience to whatever role he manages to get. Younger students cannot do that. They are captured. They are impressionable.

I suspect universities have always been something like this but there are other factors now at work. "Open discussion" is "the wrong sort of social media" now. The "respectful sharing of ideas" is not possible when the law moves in and prevents anything which might "harm" someone.  It doesn't happen when you get marked down for having an alternative view, or for even just raising an alternative view.

We need genuine open discussion done with genuine respect. It isn't happening here. I just hope there is more of it elsewhere.  

The growing rise of One Nation

here and Reform in the UK is causing alarm among the more "traditional" parties in politics.

"One Nation is dangerous," I was told yesterday. This came from a resident in these units who apparently has strong political views. I listened. I said nothing. I was thinking about psychology, not politics. Why do we "believe" things?

As children we believe in Father Christmas or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the "tooth fairy" or participate in "Elf on the Shelf" or something equally unlikely. I knew full well who "Father Christmas" was at age three but I also knew it was wise to "believe" in it and not say anything to those children who did believe. I now wonder whether there were not a few more children like me. Country children know milk does not simply come in a bottle or calves from holes in the ground so why should they believe in Santa Claus? They have other "magic" right around them. 

When I was small other things were magical too. They were rare. We did not have doors which slid open. I remember the first time we came across one and my brother insisted on going through it three times. We thought travelling in a lift (elevator to you North Americans) was fun. They were often operated by a man in uniform. We thought it would be a fascinating job to do that all day! 

There were traffic lights and pedestrian lights - both unheard of out in the rural areas we lived in - and the way "the Man in Blue" site worked at the railway station so you knew where to go and catch your train. (There was no Platform 9 and 3/4.)

I thought of all these things and more, of how I believed not so much in them but in the magic of them.  Watching people interact with them was fascinating. 

Perhaps now it is the same for many adults. There is a fascination with the new politics of One Nation. People want something different. For some it is perhaps a return to the past, to a time when things seemed more certain. For others there is a desire to believe in something akin to Father Christmas and the tooth fairy.  

Dual citizenship is a

surely a curious idea. How can you have allegiance to more than one country?

It has come up in relation to migration and government benefits recently but it is something I have often come across when talking with people who are migrants. Some of them want "citizenship" of this country and others do not. For some it is a matter of not being able to hold dual citizenship and for others it is something they simply do not feel strongly about. There are other reasons too for not wanting to become a citizen but I will leave it at that.

As a child at school I was required to "salute the flag". This ceremony happened every Friday morning at "assembly". The whole school would be lined up in the schoolyard. We faced the flag (lowered and raised every day by "flag monitors") and repeated the "I am an.... I love my country...and so on." 

I have no idea what other children thought but the way we often had to repeat it more than once "to say it as if you actually mean it" was something I quite simply found of no interest at all. I had no sense of any pride in my country. It is unlikely I understood what it meant at age four when I started school. At age fourteen (and we still did it) it was simply embarrassing. I reached a point where I was mouthing the words but not actually saying them. All these years later nothing has changed. I have no sense of being a citizen of this country. I feel no sense of "national pride". For me the "national anthem" is like a dirge. 

I shock people when I say this. "But how can you feel like that?" they ask me. They often go on to tell me "it is the best country in the world" and how "lucky" I am to live here. Is it a good country to live in? Yes, it is. It is an exceptionally good country in many ways but, like the Senior Cat, I am also aware of a sense of "isolation". Migration from other countries has not changed that. "Multiculturalism" has not changed that. It may be that those things have even increased my sense of isolation. In recent years it has become much harder. All too often I am being told I am living on "stolen" land, that my Celtic heritage is not something to even be acknowledged, that other ethnic groups can celebrate the national days of the countries they (or their ancestors) come from but I cannot. 

The world is an extraordinary place. The diversity is so great nobody can hope to understand it. I do not want to be restricted to the idea that one country with a tiny population on a large land mass is more important than anything else. I do not want to believe that my allegiance should be to that and that alone.  Is that wrong? 

  

So cows know their humans?

In one of those odd little coincidences there is a small filler in the paper this morning about some research which observed that cows spend longer looking at people they do not know. Yesterday I was talking to a former dairy farmer and we were agreeing that his cows knew him.

Of course they do. I have no doubt about this at all. I lived in a dairying district as a child. The cows knew the people who milked them. There were occasional complaints about cow behaviour if someone else had to come in and do the milking. There would also be mention of misbehaviour if the cows objected to the type of music being played while they were being milked. (Cows prefer classical sorts of music. How do I know? Observation. Talking to dairy farmers.) 

We know dogs know the humans who are important to them. Why should it be any different for cows? Cats know. Sheep know. Goats know. I have observed it in all these animals. I have observed it in an alpaca too.

Middle Cat occasionally has to feed the cats belonging to her sons. She will need to do it in a few days time. One cat in particular will actively seek extra attention. He "does not like to be left". We give him human emotions when we say this but to assume they are incapable of emotion is surely wrong? He will settle only after being given attention. Does he "know" Middle Cat? Of course he does.

My late uncle had a dog who would hide under the table after being clipped for the summer. It never happened at any other time. Why? Was it "embarrassment" over appearance? That seems unlikely but trauma over the experience of being clipped is a possibility perhaps? That still suggests an ability to experience an emotion humans know. 

I often talk to dogs. They will be tied up outside the shopping centre. Sometimes they will be very close to where I park my trike. Of course I could ignore them but it would be unwise to do that. If they look at me I will look back. I need to make a judgment about how friendly they are likely to be and how carefully I need to move around them. Do some of them know me? Of course they do. I have occasionally met them when they are out on a walk. On more than one occasion another human in their household has expressed surprise that "their" dog should know me. I explain and sometimes they still look surprised. 

I am not surprised at all. I expect the dog will know me. The idea that animals take no interest in humans apart from being a source of food is ridiculous. Of course they are interested, interested in their own way and for their own purposes. If I spoke to cows on a regular basis I would expect them to know me if I knew them. 

What they "think" about me of course is something else altogether.  

 

"Why don't you get a motor on it?"

I had to answer that question again yesterday. It is a question I have had to answer many times when people look at my tricycle. 

"I need the exercise," I tell them. There is often a puzzled look and someone, almost always the male of the species, will tell me that a bicycle engine does not mean "no exercise".

"But then I could not take it on the train," I tell them. This is met with more puzzled looks. 

I think I understand what they are getting at. They see bikes and, by extension, my trike as something to be used occasionally. They ride "for pleasure". They will look on a ten or twenty or thirty kilometre ride as something done as entertainment.

I pedal because I must. I do not own a car. I do not know how to drive. I have never had a licence. If I want to go to the library, the supermarket, the post office or the surgery I need to pedal there. It is too far to walk. 

If it comes to the point where I cannot pedal then I will perhaps have to consider one of those little motorised ride on "scooters" that have become popular. The Senior Cat had one. Middle Cat has it now. They are not a substitute for the convenience of a car but they do extend the social life of many people. 

I came out of the library one day and found my little vehicle on its side. There was a man there looking earnestly at it. "Is this yours? I would have asked but I didn't know who it belonged to and..."

He was building a trike for his disabled son and wanted to know how mine was built. I let him take photographs of what was puzzling him. 

There are other people who want to know where I bought it, what it cost and how easy it is to ride. The local bicycle shop owes me commission on several sales - or should.

"I saw your bike outside. I knew you were around somewhere," is something which has been said to me more than once. That has advantages and disadvantages. There are times when I just want to be able to get things done, not indulge in conversation with someone who disagrees with something I said in a "letter to the editor".

I get wet when it rains and it is sometimes rather cold but at least it does not snow here.  I know I need to pedal on regardless and, when people ask if it is hard to ride, I tell them, "No, it runs on bananas."

It is a response which usually brings at least a smile - and that makes my day.  

 

  

Thanks to Emma Darwin I came across

something called "Goodhart's Law" yesterday. It is something I had not heard of before but Emma found it interesting and it left me pondering it too.

Put simply it is stated as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." One of the examples given by the internet when I looked it up was how the Soviets once measured the output of a nail factory by the total weight of the nails produced. The factory then produced a smaller number of very heavy and unusable nails to meet the required quota. As this was not working those in charge switched the goal to the number of nails produced. This resulted in factories making millions of tiny and equally useless nails. 

It is an easy to understand example that makes sense to me. It is the way humans will work if they can. I suspect most of us are naturally lazy unless we see some benefit for ourselves.

But Goodhart's Law also works in other ways. We probably would not even see it as being relevant to things like housing or discrimination measures but it might be.

Buying a second house (or more) and then renting it out has been a means of bringing in money for centuries, for as long as people have had houses. Not everyone can afford to do it but those that do are providing a service for those who need a roof over their heads. Yes, I know there are "greedy" landlords out there. I know there are landlords who are renting out sub-standard accommodation for inflated prices. We hear about them all the time. 

There are also landlords, and I suspect they are the majority, who keep the property in good repair and charge a fair rent. They do it because it makes economic sense to do it. This is the way they do not make a loss and may make a small profit. There are people who do it because they see it as the way they will not need to be dependent on a government pension. It makes sense that they should not be penalised for doing this. Recent government changes will penalise them. It might not be to the same degree that future landlords would be penalised but there is still a penalty there. It is going to reduce the number of dwellings available to rent - in a serious housing shortage.

It also makes sense to try and ensure that there are measures in place to ensure that other people will be able to own their own homes if they wish to do so. It makes sense not to put obstacles in the way of home ownership if this is what people want. 

There are also measures which should not be undertaken in order to achieve these goals. It is those measures which the present government is now pursuing. They sound good. Of course they sound good but the reality is that they are not good. 

That person with their "own new build home" on a five percent deposit actually owes more than they will ever be able to pay back. The government effectively owns the home and has restricted their ability to move anywhere else because of the way the scheme is set up.  In an age where many people need to be flexible and change employers in order to keep working this presents problems. There will be other issues later too.  I know of one person who had to continue renting because he knows he could be transferred interstate at any time. The scheme does not help him at all. There are many more people like him. 

In another area there is the law which was intended to ensure there was no sexual discrimination. It was changed to give "rights" to a tiny group of individuals and has now ended up giving rights to nobody at all. 

There are laws around agriculture which were brought in to increase yields and now harm the environment but are still in place. There is the environmental damage done so we can "save the planet from global warming".

It all sounds good but perhaps we should just have a "law of unintended consequences"?  

 

 

 

 

"Too hard to buy a house"

comes the cry. "Housing is too expensive" and "Young people can't get a foot on the ladder of the housing market these days" and... well, you know how it goes.

My parents married in 1947. Yes, not long after WWII. There was a severe shortage of housing, of building materials for houses and the land on which to build houses. There were many people out of work too. 

The Senior Cat was a teacher in a small country town (village to those of you in Upover).  There was no spare housing at all. He had been boarding with a family, sharing a bedroom with another teacher from the high school. It was not an ideal situation and marrying Mum meant that finding something else was not only urgent it was absolutely essential. 

One of the local farmers had a galvanised iron shed on top of a small hill just outside what were then the boundaries of the town. It was unlined. The floor was just packed dirt. Some old linoleum was found, a spare wood burning stove was found. Other odds and ends were found. The windmill was connected to the water supply and a "long drop dunny" was dug for use. My parents moved in. They lived in it for the next two years. They sat on fruit boxes and ate at a collapsible card table. When it had been cleared at night lessons were prepared under the light of a kerosene lamp. 

I came along at the end of the first of those years and it was my home for the first year of my life. I have small memories of the place from occasional visits to it when I was around two years of age. 

My parents considered themselves incredibly fortunate because, as teachers, they were eligible for one of the new "Housing Trust" places being built in the township proper. These were "fibro-asbestos" homes that the government was putting up as quickly as they could for essential workers. Some of those homes are still occupied today. They are very basic structures. They are small. They had no air conditioning. In winter you heated the house by opening the oven door of the wood burning stove and allowing the hot air from the oven to escape into the room. 

Three years later the Senior Cat was promoted and transferred to a larger school in the city. For the next few years we lived in a house my paternal grandfather had found. We shared it with one of my mother's aunts and her five children. 

From there, as the Senior Cat was promoted from one place to another, we lived in housing belonging to the government. My parents had no choice. It was all there was. It was a roof over their heads and they considered themselves fortunate to have it. The rent they paid was the same as anyone else would have paid for similar accommodation in the city. 

It was not until the Senior Cat was finally given a city appointment we stopped living in departmental housing. (My parents then moved into my mother's old family home as her mother had just died.) It was only then they could even think about buying their own home. That was not easy but, late in their working lives, they managed it. They had actually ceased working when they finally moved into a home they could really call their own.

Now though it seems that newly weds want their own home, or they are told they want their own home. They are told this is what their parents and grandparents had and they have a "right" to it as well. The present government is telling them this even while telling them there is a severe housing shortage. They are being told they "need" a range of white goods and the garden needs to be landscaped right up to the patio. 

My parents generation had none of this. Middle Cat and Brother Cat took thirty years to pay off the mortgage and did the improvements themselves as they could afford to do it. I saved every cent I could and found a place for my sleeping mat less than two years ago. It does not have many of the things considered "essential" but it has all I need - and I know I am lucky to have it.

Getting a foot on the housing ladder is difficult. It was always difficult. I suspect part of the problem now is what people are being told they "need" and trying to find somewhere with what they actually need. There's a difference.