Taxes do not always work

the way they are seemingly intended to work. 

The UK government has apparently added VAT (our GST) to their "public" (private) school woes. What has happened is possibly the reverse of what has been intended - or apparently intended. Pupils are leaving those schools and going to state schools. Every time they do I am told the taxpayer has to fork out another £8,600 for another student. They would not be getting that back in VAT.

So, why did they do it? 

The same issue comes up regularly in Downunder. There are complaints about "funding private education", about the way it gives "wealthy" families "advantages". 

The reality is different. If every student who now attends a fee paying school went to a state school the actual tax burden would be higher on everyone.  It is cheaper for the government to provide some of the education funds to the fee paying school system. It does not stop the complaints but the government is trying to find a balance between getting students where they want them and keeping taxpayers happy. 

Governments like to have students under their control. It is why we have things like "the national curriculum". It is why there are demands to teach certain topics and how they must be taught. Fee paying schools cannot ignore the national curriculum but they can teach it in other ways and with other emphases. The same applies to "home schooling". In this state your "homeschool" family is monitored for that very reason. Is your child being taught what the state demands? 

  The same ideas also apply to the recent tax changes. They are not designed to make it easier for young people to own their first home. The changes to items like the "capital gains tax" are not aimed at young people at all. They are being applied to houses bought before 1985. Economists, who generally know something about the consequences of these things, are saying there will now be many more people who find they owe more than the "asset" they are paying off is actually worth - what is known as "negative equity". 

Why has the government made the changes? It is not actually going to solve their revenue problem but it will give them greater control over the revenue they are getting. People will move into the forms of investment the government prefers.

All this has been carefully explained to me. I do not pretend to understand "big" economics. I do know that the cost of everything has gone up so quickly that what I am being told about "intergenerational equity" is wrong. Perhaps someone can explain if it is supposed to work differently?   

A diagnosis of cancer

has come as no surprise to me. No, not for me so far but for a more distant cousin.

He has been a smoker, a heavy smoker until recent years. He "cut back" to twelve a day and then six a day but could never quite give the habit up. Now he is paying the price.

The first warning came a couple of years ago. He had a cancer growing under a finger nail. They removed it and part of his finger as well. 

Then, late last year, it was "prostate cancer". Oh it was not aggressive and it was "treatable".  Well yes, perhaps it is or was. I know other men with similar problems. One was diagnosed about eight years ago, had surgery and is "just fine". 

More recently other problems have developed for my cousin. His wife phoned me early last evening and said, "He's been diagnosed with an aggressive bladder cancer. They did a scan and it is in his hip and thigh bones as well."

He is currently enduring a month of radiotherapy. How much good this will do they have no idea. He is considered to be "too old" for surgery to remove his bladder. As the cancer has already apparently metastasized  I wonder about this.

It has come at a time when there is a government advertisement I see between the two parts of the news service I watch. It is an advertisement designed to encourage people to give up smoking. It tells people that smoking can cause "eleven different types of cancer". Bladder cancer is mentioned in it. 

I wonder if the advertising has any effect. I wonder if my cousin has seen it and, if he has, what his thoughts are about it. I wonder if he wishes he had never begun to smoke.

The Senior Cat, like the vast majority of men his age, smoked. It was a habit they took up during the war. The Senior Cat was never a heavy smoker. It would be the occasional cigarette here or there but he quit entirely when I was kitten in early primary school. He saw something on the desk of one of his lecturers at university. The lecturer concerned had been diagnosed with lung cancer. That was enough for the Senior Cat. He went over to eating peppermints instead. Never a fat man the little weight he put on was probably a good thing.  

I have never even tried to smoke a cigarette but it has not made me immune from the consequences of smoking. In my lifetime I have had to endure the second hand smoke of other people's addiction. While I genuinely believed the school library should always be open at lunch time I was also relieved I did not have to endure the smoke laden atmosphere. When there were staff meetings at university I would sit as close as I could to the always open window. My good friend A... would insist on it being open. We did not smoke. No female member of staff did. It was the men. 

"You don't think it is going to happen to you," one of the professors told us when he had to tell us that another one had been diagnosed with cancer. These were intelligent people but tobacco addiction is hard to kick, very hard.

Middle Cat and Brother Cat do not smoke. Their children do not smoke and their grandchildren had better not even think about it or their parents will have more than something to say. Most people I know do not smoke now. Some did but they have stopped. It has been hard but they have done it. Anyone who does smoke knows to stay well away from me. I will cough and sneeze and I feel as if I am choking on their smoke. Where is the pleasure in that?

I am so grateful I never felt the temptation to try. It may not stop me getting a cancer diagnosis at some point but at least I will know that it has not been directly caused by a decision I made to smoke. I just wish my cousin had made the same decision. 

We have a new member of the judiciary

and she has moved straight from being a member of parliament across to that position. She retired from politics at the state election.  She is now an associate judge in the Supreme Court on a salary of over $400,000 a year.

This alarms me. We are supposed to have a system of "separation of powers" in this country. 

You know what I mean don't you? The system which separates the government from the administration of law. It has not happened here. I am absolutely certain this woman would have known that she was going to be appointed to the judiciary before she "retired". The government had almost certainly worked out she would be considered "surplus to requirements" in parliament so they found a way of moving her to a position where she will be sympathetic to whatever else they have planned.

It might work I suppose. 

It has been tried before in this country and it will be tried again. There have been appointments to the High Court which have very definitely been political appointments. To the credit of the judiciary they have often produced results the appointees (or those appointing them) did not want. 

A member of the High Court also went on to be one of the best Governors-General this country has ever had. He worked successfully with two strikingly different governments. More than once he informed a government something could not be done. As a law student I, like many other students at the time, met him and liked him. He was a known thorn in the side of some senior public servants. It is what he should have been too. 

I wonder how this woman will work. How will she feel if the law informs her she needs to go against the wishes of her former colleagues? 

The courts are there for us to test the law. They are there to apply it.  They are not there to do the bidding of the government.  

School buses are an essential

part of the life of many rural students here. They also serve other purposes.

I tried explaining this to someone yesterday. He apparently comes from a very wealthy enclave in a large American city. Students there apparently get taken to school by their parents in much the same way that students get taken by their parents and grandparents here. It was not something he knew much about.

He had asked me because one of the big yellow school buses had appeared outside one of our local shopping centres. He wanted to know about it. There was a well behaved group heading into the local cinema complex and they had obviously come on the bus.

It brought back memories of those buses. The Senior Cat was once the head of the school with the most bus runs in the state. They were also the longest bus runs. One started at seven in the morning and finished at around five at night. Two more of the destinations were not much shorter. 

The buses travelled across unsealed roads. They stopped at the rural mail boxes where the farm started. The farm house would often be another three or four miles away. More than one of the children would then need to walk home or, if they were lucky, there would be a vehicle of some sort sitting there and they would ride home. One boy began to drive an adapted "Mini" at seven. The distance to the house was simply too far and nobody could come to get him. 

The buses were never the Senior Cat's direct responsibility. His eyesight issues meant he could not have the "commercial" or "heavy goods" licence to drive a school bus. The buses were the responsibility of his deputy.  The buses were driven by the teachers. It was a very long day for them and for the children at the end of the runs.

There were no mobile phones then. Even the "land lines" were patchy. You could be miles away from one too. If the bus broke down or had a flat tyre you had to hope that someone might come along the same road or that the nearest farm house was not too far away.  If there were very senior boys on the bus then you might be able to fix something with their help. There was one "spare" bus at the school and the deputy might be able to drive out and collect the children and bring them into school. It was a constant worry. It is probably still a constant worry. 

At the previous school I had travelled on those buses once a week. We had to go to another school for "woodwork" and "domestic science". These subjects were a compulsory part of the curriculum but these were mostly farm students who knew more about woodwork, metalwork, cooking and sewing than their teachers. We endured the journey down the twenty-two tight bends in the hill and hoped the bus would not break down. I always felt ill. 

I never envied the students who needed to travel on those buses every day. The older students would try to do their homework because there would be farm chores waiting when they arrived home. The younger students would often fall asleep and be carried off the bus by older siblings or a waiting parent.

The service was, rightly, free. It is still free. The buses were not supposed to carry other passengers or parcels but in reality they did. It was sometimes essential. When the mail van needed a part that had to come from the city the school buses left the mail at the same places the students were left. Other people would collect theirs from the box at the gate. They would have been alerted by the family whose box it was. 

There was no internet. The phone service worked on a "party" line and the whole system only worked because people knew one another and worked together.

The stranger who had asked me the question looked disbelieving when I told him all of this.

"Did you get a bus like that when you started school?" he wanted to know. 

I shook my head. "I rode my tricycle. It was only a mile and half."

"But someone went with you?"

"Not after the first week."

He looked shocked. "They wouldn't let you do that now."

No, they would not - but I am glad they did then.  

 

"We should just get rid of them"

I was told yesterday. 

In between the heavy showers someone was out there "clearing up the mess the trees leave". He was not a happy man at all. 

There are some lovely street trees around here. There are not nearly enough in my view. This man thought there were too many. 

I know this man by sight, not name. I know his wife in the same way. She is one of those meek women who does as she is told. He's a bully. No, he has never hit her but I suspect he abuses her in ways neither of them recognise. 

He likes everything to be absolutely neat and orderly. Their "garden" is mostly paving with a patch of lawn and some rose bushes pruned to within an inch of their lives. I have never seen the back garden but I would guess it is more paving and a little lawn. He has complained to the neighbours about their trees.

The trees he was complaining about though are two street trees. They are both London plane trees and they are genuinely lovely trees. So what if they drop their leaves for winter? In summer they are home to a lot of bird life. As I pedal past on a hot day it is noticeably cooler under those trees. More than once I have seen older people just stopping for a moment or two beneath them. Young children race around them. One of the local boys climbed one last summer. It was not done out of mischief but to rescue a small kite belonging to a much younger child. A mother and child were picking up leaves and counting a couple of days ago. A friend who "scrapbooks" searched among the leaves for "that perfect leaf". 

Most people probably go past without noticing anything in particular but they would notice if the trees were not there. The idea of simply "getting rid of them" is not something I ever want to contemplate. 

I have been advocating for more trees for almost as long as I can remember. They make a vast difference to the urban landscape. We could cease all the "global warming" discussions if we planted enough trees and other greenery. Yes, it has to be right sort of tree, the right sort of greenery but once it is there it makes a difference. It can make ten or more degrees of difference on a hot day. We use less power to cool ourselves when there are trees there. 

We need more trees. The power demands of the AI centres mean we will need even more trees than before. The idea of getting rid of perfectly healthy and very useful trees just because they drop some leaves frightens me.  I pedalled on without comment.   

There is transport chaos this morning

and the weather is very damp with it. 

The news is telling us that two of our train lines have been closed because someone has been hit at a junction. There are no "substitute" buses available. People have been told to catch the regular buses. 

I am concerned for the person who has been hit. I am concerned for the person who hit them too. I will always be concerned because, years ago now, I had a conversation with a train driver who had hit a child. The child did not survive. There was no fault on the train driver's part. You simply cannot stop a train when a child, fooling around, falls off the platform in front of you as you are pulling in. The driver was completely exonerated and still felt responsible. He almost gave up driving at the time and, years later, the incident still caused him deep anguish. He had gone back to work but never drove that route again.

I wonder what will happen this time. It is not the sort of thing most people will think about I suppose. They will, for the most part, be annoyed their morning commute has been disrupted.

I used that line recently. I actually caught the return train at the station where the incident occurred. There is a major road leading to and from the city to the port area no more than two hundred metres away. Buses travel along that road but there would need to be additional buses. Those buses already on the route do not travel half empty in peak hour. They are already carrying maximum loads. The "advice" to use them is not going to be a great deal of help to most people.  

Not even all the buses are running. There are two routes that come in this direction. One does a loop around the city. The other goes to a seaside suburb and then loops further around.  They cannot go where they need to go either. 

Add in the road works and another "incident" and the chaos has increased to a level rarely seen. People in this city and surrounding suburbs are not used to this. The long commutes of people who live in some other cities are something some people simply are not used to and not prepared to tolerate.    

That said the disruption could have been minimised. There should be a plan in place to deal with such a contingency. We do not have a big rail network. 

I am fortunate, very fortunate. There was a message this morning informing me "Meeting cancelled". I am very glad not to be going out into all the chaos.  

"Would you want to go caving?"

was the question being asked me in the supermarket yesterday. There were two men discussing the attempts to rescue the men stuck in a cave system in Laos. 

One of these two men apparently knew the man from this state who had gone to help with the rescue. Neither man knew much about "caving" but neither wanted to do it. 

I hope they did not realise how much even the question made me feel shaky. I do not like very small, dark spaces. The idea of being in dark, wet, cold place where you can barely move and there is rough rock around you is the stuff of nightmares. Why do people want to do it?

It rates along with climbing Mt Everest or rowing across the Pacific in a rubber dinghy for me. I will never do any of these things. I would not want to do them even if I had the physical capacity to do them.

My parents took us on a caravan trip to the neighbouring state one year. It was not quite a holiday. The Senior Cat had a two day conference at the other end. Mum was checking out the then boarding school for the children of Christian Scientists. She wanted us to go there. We did not want to go but, if the money had been there, my brother and I would have been dispatched to it. Fortunately the idea never came to anything. I think we really would have run away if she had succeeded. 

Perhaps it was that visit and the awareness of a certain tension between our parents that made the trip to the caves more stressful. There had been no argument. They did not argue. I suppose the Senior Cat knew there was no real likelihood of us being sent off to any boarding school in another state. The money simply would not be there. Mum's parents had no money and nobody else was going to pay for it. Mum got as far as the deposit for me and no further. She must have paid for it herself. I remember seeing the uniform list that was sent. Perhaps the association with that memory is part of the next.

On the way back we took it slowly towing a tiny caravan. We came along the coastline and then inland slightly. There was the "Blue Lake" and then, a bit further along, there were the caves. In those days you could just go in and out with a local person to show you. The caves were nothing like the caves the men were trapped in but they are still caves. They are dark and damp and all the stalactites and stalagmites in the world did not make it "beautiful" for me. I hated it. Mum insisted I went on into it, that I walked (or stumbled) around it. She gave us all a lesson on how they were formed and why they were so significant. I hated every minute of it. I was just told, "Don't be so silly. If you don't stop behaving like that now I will..." I cannot remember what the proposed punishment was. I was probably too frightened by then.

My brother backed me. I remember him saying, "It was horrible in there. I don't ever want to be a cave man." 

I have no doubt my mother genuinely believed she was providing us with an experience that we would appreciate. She had visited the caves as a child and apparently enjoyed the experience. That any of us might not feel the same way almost certainly would have surprised her. 

I remember the wonderful sensation of coming outside again. The sky was a solid blue. The air was warm. It was a different sort of quiet. I could hear the birds. There were all sorts of colours around me again. It felt so much safer. 

We went on to the place where we would be spending the night. I watched the road and counted fence posts and tried not to think of the caves. Mum was still rather cross with us. We were told we did not appreciate how lucky we were. Perhaps we did not - or perhaps we did.

That evening Mum sent my brother and me off to the shower block of the caravan park. She could see us from where we had to go I suppose. It was growing dark by then but that did not bother us. I can remember my brother saying, "I am never never never going in another cave." I could only fervently agree.