Journalism in Australia

hit a new low yesterday. It tends to be pretty dismal at the best of times. There are claims made about "left" and "right" and "pro" and "anti", about the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), the Fairfax and Murdoch controlled papers and more. I believe it would be fair to say that the media leans left - although not quite as far as some people would like to believe. Like other things views on that are coloured by individual political leanings.
With respect to politics I like to think of myself as a cat sitting on a fence post and annoying the hell out of the dogs on both sides. It's the only way to survive politics Downunder.
We have a national newspaper "The Australian" (Murdoch stable). I am not sure how it survives although the standard of journalism in that is generally better than the state focussed newspapers. Our state newspaper tends to read a bit like the old "News of the World" at times and also belongs to the Murdoch stable.
I also get a couple of professional news feeds. I don't read them all the time but if a major emergency occurs then I need to know what is going on because it could involve work for me.
And then there are sites like Twitter - and there lies yesterday's problem. Professional journalists use Twitter and that is fine. It's their job to inform people - and that is what they should be doing. They should be informing people. It is not a journalist's role to make news. It is a journalist's role report it and, if they are also have a regular column, to comment on it.
It is not a journalist's role to make gloating, sarcastic comments. It is not a regular columnist's role to make gloating, sarcastic comments either.  There were journalists and columnists making both of those yesterday - over the almost certain demise of the Prime Minister. They have been agitating for his removal ever since he took office, indeed since before that.  No, they don't like him. He wasn't their choice of PM. They have made sure other people don't like him either. Oh yes they had plenty to say about the previous two Prime Ministers as well but the comments yesterday reached a new low. Made about any other individual than a politician these remarks would have amounted to libel. They were designed as the definition goes to "bring someone into hatred, ridicule or contempt".
One individual in particular stepped beyond the bounds of fair comment - even fair comment about a politician he loves to hate. That is going too far.
The danger, which apparently journalists refuse to recognise, is that such behaviour could end up leaving everyone less able to comment. Do we really want restrictions on the media that see people thrown in gaol and news sites shut down?

Change the time zone!

Change the time zone! Should I say that again? Change the time zone!
It is an issue which has been debated in this state many times over the years. It has been raised no less than eight times in the past thirty or so.
Business, or so we are told, is agitating for the state to "fall in line with the eastern states" because the half hour between us and them is expensive, confusing and awkward.
What utter rubbish! Business is, or should be, done on a global basis. Business should be able to work in multiple time zones.
I work in multiple time zones. I frequently need to calculate what time it is anywhere from Amsterdam to Ulan Bator, from London to Santiago or from Doha to Washington - and everywhere in between. Yes, I often need to do something outside "normal office-hours". I don't have "normal office-hours". It is part of my job.
If an ordinary business with multiple employees cannot cope with a half hour time difference then there is something very wrong. Do businesses in the central time zone of Downunder only do business with those in the eastern time zone? Of course they don't.
The time zone is actually already out of step with the rest of the world. The sensible thing would be to go back half an hour and place it in the same zone as a country like Japan. It would then be closer to the entire Asian area - the area we are told the country is and should be concentrating on for business purposes.
But of course everyone knows why the issue has come up again now. It's because the government needs us to concentrate on anything but the economy, anything but the fact the state is bankrupt and that they have wasted millions of dollars. Why, for example, did they spend $47m doing up the emergency department in a hospital only to then say they are going to close it? And, they mean close it. That part of the hospital will simply sit empty - as will the other emergency departments they want to close.
Middle Cat has a friend who is an anaesthetist. When her friend's contract at a public hospital came to an end she reapplied. She didn't get the position. Nobody did. The position no longer exists. Surgery lists have been cancelled because there is no anaesthetist available.
I have a friend who needs hip replacements. It has reached the point where she can walk no more than a few metres. She has been waiting almost six years for surgery although, at barely fifty, she has been assessed as "urgent".
But never mind the government is still spending millions on entertaining the population. We've just had the Tour Down Under and now there is the Clipsal car race. Soon it will be time for the Festival of Arts (now an annual rather than a biennial event). 
Perhaps I can eat cake at Writers' Week?

I would not like to be

the Prime Minister of Downunder right now. He is getting it from all sides. He is not popular.
He has never been popular with the media. They have been agitating for his removal from the time he entered politics. That was rather a long time ago. Since then he has been re-elected more than once by his own electorate. Presumably they do see something in him.
He was once the Health Minister in another time and I had dealings with him then. People tend not to believe me when I tell them that, as Health Ministers go, he was easy to work with. He actually listened. He took advice. If something was possible and within policy guidelines then he would see it was done. Yes, he was also autocratic and sometimes impatient. He was not always wildly diplomatic. But, things got done. It may have helped that I knew one of his colleagues rather well and she smoothed the path but I still needed to work with him. I also knew, perhaps better than most, that what people wanted wasn't always possible. Politics is about the possible - and that is not always what people want.
The present Prime Minister took the top job from a man I neither like or trust, Malcolm Turnbull. Both are former Rhodes' Scholars. While never actually a member of the "other" party Turnbull has been courted by  the Australian Labor Party and his views are more in keeping with those of the ALP.  He also has strong business links with senior members of the ALP.  
Turnbull lost the leadership of the  Coalition when he tried to get the party to accept a major ALP policy - the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. The present PM challenged him and won - by one vote. Some of those who voted for him were undoubtedly mindful of their own positions.
Turnbull deserved to lose but he has never accepted the decision of his colleagues. Neither has the media.
I suspect that, in the end, Turnbull and the media will have their way. People I know who work as journalists have told me that the media does not intend to give up on efforts to oust the Prime Minister. "We can make or break a Prime Minister. It doesn't how matter how good he is."
Yes, they can and they will if they can. They have done it before.
In the middle of all this we have a serious problem. We have a democratically elected government which is not being permitted to govern. The policies they want to put in place are being described as "unfair" - unfair because they are not the socialist policies of the Opposition. I love the sound of socialist policies which say that there should be more equality, that people should have fairness in the workplace, that childcare should be provided to all who need it and that everyone should be able to own their own home.
I also know that the reality is that we cannot afford to do these things without lowering the standard of living for all. That's not going to happen.
So perhaps the next best thing is to be rid of the debt and the need to pay $110m a day (and rising) in interest on debts alone. Then we can spend that money on those who need it most.
That's not going to happen. I suppose people will now tell me I don't understand economics. No, I don't but it doesn't stop me wanting to believe in Utopia - and wishing they would let the government get on with the business of governing instead of trying to prevent an implosion brought on by external detonators.

I am absolutely fuming,

indeed angrier than I was when I first heard it might happen.
We have a hospital in this state which was built to serve the needs of men and women who were injured in war.  It has served that purpose well.
I know the place well. I have been in and out of it hundreds of time visiting mostly elderly war veterans. They have been well cared for there. The staff who work there have usually been aware of the special psychological needs of some of their patients.
Middle Cat worked there for some years - in the physiotherapy department. She is also aware of the very special needs some of her patients had.
Over the years there have been fewer veterans but the hospital has also taken over specialist care for older patients with mental health needs and end-of-life care in an excellent hospice. It also has a pulmonary unit which serves people with long term needs and an artificial limb centre which serves most of the southern half of the state.
The place is a warren of wards, some of them old and others new. A new building went up last year. It was supposed to be a specialist centre.
Yesterday the state government announced that they were, as rumours had been having it, going to close the place. There has, rightly, been an outcry over this. There has already been a petition to the government to keep it open. Medical staff I know are appalled by the decision. There is nowhere else for some of the essential services the hospital provides. Other places which provide something similar are already over loaded. There are waiting lists.
This decision has been made by a government which spent millions of dollars rebuilding oval facilities which could and should have been paid for by those who use the oval. It is a decision made by a government which spent millions more building a footbridge over a river rather than telling people to walk a hundred metres more over another bridge. It is a decision made by a government which has recently sold off a valuable parcel of land at a greatly reduced price.  The money saved on all those things could have renovated and rebuilt a hospital that was doing an essential service.
I would not like to be our local member of parliament. He happens to be the Minister for Veterans' Affairs. He is already in strife because he switched his allegiance - for his own benefit - without consulting the electorate. He will now have to face the fury of many more.
That hospital was - and should still be - an essential service. It is time government recognised that there are more important things than watching sport.

"What's the sun made of?"

I heard the question behind me. Father and four year old daughter were having a conversation while Mother was trying to find trousers the right size for Father. (I was buying work trousers for the Senior Cat. The others were in a disgraceful state.)
Mother and I looked at one another and then she said softly, "She's always asking questions like that."
We agreed it was a good thing and I took the Senior Cat's trousers off the rack and went off wondering if the child would go on asking questions like that. I hope she will. She obviously had parents who care about her because the father's answer was, "I don't know but we can go to the library on the way home and find out."
It was a good answer.
I wonder how many other parents would have answered that way? As I was retelling this to a neighbour she said, "It's tempting to make up an answer sometimes." Ouch!
I don't think I have ever been guilty of that. I hope not. I didn't ever do it when I was teaching, even when faced with the prospect of trying to explain something to a child with very limited experience of the world.
I remember when one of the children I was teaching really discovered grass for the first time. She would have been about nine years of age. She had been wheeled in her wheelchair across grass of course, wheeled across it many times. She had seen it and she "knew" what it was but she had never touched it or tasted it or felt it against her skin.
We took her out of her wheelchair that day because it needed a repair. The workshop engineer had come to get it while we were outside. We put her on the mat and, somehow, she managed to roll over onto the grass. One of the staff went to put her back on the mat when I said, "Leave her for a moment. Dannie..."
She looked at me and smiled and, with the effort it took her to say anything at all, she told me "Grass tickles!"
I took some blades of grass back into the classroom and borrowed a magnifying glass from the main office of the institution. We looked at the grass under the magnifying glass. Yes, she was interested but one of the boys wanted to know more. He couldn't speak but I could sense his disappointment when the magnifying glass had to be put away. 
"Want to know some more Peter?" I asked. He looked quickly at the ceiling, his way of saying "Yes".
He had to wait of course. He had to wait for everything. He was an intelligent child in a classroom full of children with all sorts of serious intellectual and physical disabilities. At last I was able to get back to him. What did he want to know? We went through the tortuous process of question and answer, the limited words on his communication board - in the days before any electronic device. He wanted to know why grass was green. We looked at the library shelf and, thankfully, there was a simple science text there with an explanation in pictures that at seven years of age and limited experience he could understand. I only had a few minutes to spend with him but I left the book open on his wheelchair tray so that he could go on looking at it.
I sent a note home in his "day book" to his brother that night. His brother was only eleven but he was the one who had to read notes because his parents didn't read English. There was a note in Peter's bag next morning, "We'll do an experiment like I did at school."
And they did. Peter brought it to school to show me. I am forever grateful to his brother for the time he spent teaching Peter what I did not have time to teach - and the Greek I had no chance of teaching.
I wonder if Peter would have asked me, "What's the sun made of?"
I wonder how I would have answered. I wish now I had taken the time to teach Peter the Greek myths and legends of his ancestors. I didn't.
But, we did find out why the grass was green.

Peter Greste is a

lucky man. It may not seem like that at first glance. Indeed 400 days in an Egyptian prison was undoubtedly one of those "hell on earth" experiences that the rest of us have no desire to go through.  But, he is still a lucky man. He could still be there. He could have died there. He could have been left there for another 40 years.
Greste will have some idea, but only some, of the delicate diplomatic work that eventually released him. It will have been very delicate indeed - right from the first very cautious approach until the plane landed in a foreign country and he was on foreign soil and not likely to be re-arrested and returned to prison.
There are some, perhaps even many, in Egypt who did not want him to be granted his freedom. Many Egyptians saw his reporting as supporting terrorism - not, as he would have it, reporting the overthrow of a democratically elected regime.
Friends in Egypt have told me that many people were disturbed by the tone of the Al Jazeera reports. There were serious questions raised about the conduct of the previous election and the violence which went with it. They have more concerns about the present regime too. 
What they are aware of however is that Egypt cannot afford to have a strict Islamic regime. Their economy depends on tourism and tourists will not go in the same numbers. Many young people are simply too well educated to go along with the restrictions which would be imposed by a strict Islamic regime and Sharia law. There would be even more dissent than there is now. Closing Egypt's borders would be well nigh impossible. Close the Suez? Shut down the Nile? Patrol the Mediterranean coastline? Have vastly increased numbers trying to reach Europe? I think not.
I wonder what the media will have managed to learn from the Greste case? My guess is that it will be very little - if anything at all. Greste and his family will thank the government (and undoubtedly be genuinely grateful) but the media will simply say "more could have been done to secure his release much earlier". The media, simply because it suits them, will try to suggest that the government did less than it could have. Given a chance the political opposition will give no more than a grudging backhanded  acknowledgment - and only because they know they might one day be in a similar position.
The media will continue to tell a story in the manner which creates the most "news" because the ability to "sell" the story depends on creating the news rather than reporting it.
Greste will write a book. It will probably be a "best-seller" but whether it will be fact or fiction is another story.

The Moscow Library

apparently went up in flames overnight....reports here Downunder are still sketchy but it seems that, at very least, massive damage has occurred.
There were more than ten million books in that library - along with a massive amount of other valuable information in the form of national and international papers from parliament and international organisations. The Slavic languages content was massive.
Imagine the entire holdings of the British Library, the Library of Congress or the French National Library going up in flames and you have some idea of the loss.
It scares me. It makes me realise how fragile our hold on the past is - and, because of that, how fragile our future is. We need the past. Without the past we cannot have the future.
The news about the Moscow Library made me think all over again about other libraries. All libraries are different but all libraries are important. We can't just discard them. We can't just discard the information in them.
I was talking with someone yesterday. She was telling me that there is renewed talk at the school her children attend. They are debating whether to "get rid of the library books". They "need the space for computers". My reaction would be the reverse "get rid of the computers" because they "need the space for library books". 
I asked my acquaintance, "How many of the kids own a laptop?" The answer was a shrug and "Most of them and those who don't can borrow one from the school".
And they need space for computers? I think not.
The Senior Cat can use the internet. He was prowling through there last night looking for another humane solution to the problem with the family of fruit rats who have invaded us from next door where the garden is a mess. There were some ideas there - and then he remembered that "somewhere in a book..." and he went through his gardening shelves and pulled one out and compared it with what he had found on the internet. I suspect that some of his day will be spent trying to construct something to catch the rats. He will use the book. Yes, he could use his i-pad but I suspect he will be happier with the book in the dust and dirt of the shed.
The notion that we don't need libraries, that any information we need can be obtained from the internet, that we don't need to read books but can read a screen instead seems wrong to me. A book, a real paper book is a different experience.  I still prefer to work with books around me. I detest scrolling backwards and forwards. In my job I might be using four or five dictionaries all at the same time. They will be foreign language dictionaries or specialist dictionaries for medical personnel, engineers or architects. I can keep pages marked with endless slips of paper and I can go to them instantly. I can have four or more open at the same time without the need to go backwards and forwards. I can hold a book - or even hug it when it gives me the answer I was searching for.
If people take away libraries from us they are stealing from us. They are stealing our past and our future. If they do that to children then they are guilty of child abuse.
It has to stop.