Our biggest trading partner?

 I wonder when and how much more it is going to take for those currently in charge of our trade relations to realise that we have made a major error in allowing China to be our "biggest trading partner". Yes, it is a huge "market". Yes, there might be "opportunities" there. 

This does not mean that these things are what is best for us. I have said elsewhere that our relationship with China has been built on laziness, on what is easiest for us. We have also allowed China to bully us into doing things their way.

There has been a recent spat between our current Foreign Minister and a former Prime Minister (of the same political persuasion). I have met both of them...and like neither of them. The FM and I clashed over an issue when I wrote to one of her colleagues suggesting that another approach might be more "diplomatic". She disagreed. The two of them ended up doing something else altogether and I had some feedback suggesting that this was because I, and a number of other people, had "interfered". Too bad. Had they gone ahead wiser heads than mine would still have been sorting out the subsequent earthquake.

The former PM is the man who flatly refused to employ me in the role everyone who knew me at the time expected me to get. Nothing could be done about it. He once strode ahead of me and slammed a door in my face - deliberately. I neither like nor trust him.

But both of them seem to think that we should be Asia-centric above all else. We also get told that by almost every other politician - even when they privately believe something else. Our current FM might well be "mending" the relationship she and her party like to claim was harmed by the previous government questioning the origins of Covid19. 

It is certainly a politically tempting move to suggest that the problems all lie with a previous PM of a different persuasion but it is actually much more complex than that. The real problems were caused by the more favourable deals that government had managed to negotiate with individual businesses in China. They made the mistake of thinking Chinese officialdom was going to allow that.  They forgot that Chinese business is done according to Chinese rules. They do not negotiate. They tell us how business will be done. If we do not like that then they have power to go elsewhere and make sure we do not get business elsewhere as well. 

We need to work on that. It is going to take very, very hard work to restore our trading ties with the rest of the world. It is going to take a great deal of diplomatic skill to do it. The problem is right now nobody seems to even recognise and acknowledge that  let alone do anything about it. 

The former PM needs to stay silent. The current FM needs to stop pretending the problem can be solved under her watch without a major change in the way we do business with the rest of the world. If that does not happen then the generation after next are going to be doing as China says. It won't be pleasant. 

A direct flight from

this part of Downunder to almost anywhere else should be possible. We may not be able to go from here to London without refuelling yet but we should be able to hop across "the pond" to the Kiwis or up to Singapore, Hong Kong or Tokyo. Perhaps we could go to Los Angeles or Vancouver too.

Apparently they are now "talking about it". I won't hold my breath. There is one direct flight to Singapore at present. It is also the most expensive option. This seems ridiculous but it is actually the case. It is actually cheaper to fly to another state and then fly from there - even though the distance is greater.

I was in my teens before I flew on an aircraft. That first flight was on an old "Fokker Friendship"...the plane that flew between the island we were living on and the mainland. 

Nobody had thought to prepare me for the experience. I don't suppose anyone had even thought about it. My sense of balance, not the best at any time, did not like the sensation of taking off, of circling. It is also a rough trip at the best of times because of the variation between land and sea. I was not a happy cat. I actually felt ill, very ill. Landing was not much better but at least I knew we would soon be on terra firma again. I have never enjoyed flying ever since. The same thing has happened every time I have flown. It is a long time since I have been on an aircraft. My siblings take it in their stride. They go places. They do things. Of course I have to admit there has been no reason for me to fly anywhere. There has been no opportunity either. I have not been on holiday in more than twenty years. Plans to go on one have been thwarted more than once...and are now being thwarted again. Grrrrrowl!

But direct flights to places would benefit many people. We might have more people come here if they could just fly straight in without the need to change planes. Bringing in goods might be cheaper.  It would certainly be cheaper to send goods out. That would be a huge benefit to our farming community and the fishing industry. 

This morning I was woken by planes flying in. This happens sometimes when they need to change the flight path coming in from the east and north-east. It happens when the times need to change. The airport, once situated "out in the country", is now in a very urban area. The first house Middle Cat and her husband lived in was directly under the flight path and very close to the airport. My BIL could hear the plane he was going to catch arrive at the airport and then leave for the airport. This was before all the security measures they now have in place and he was catching the "red eye express" to the next capital city. 

We still do not use planes in quite the same "commuting" way that North Americans or Europeans do...and perhaps they do less now that Zoom meetings are possible. Our airports are perhaps not quite the same. I don't know. They are still interesting places. It still amazes me that those heavy objects can actually fly. If they can fly direct to somewhere I want to go then maybe I will get the chance to go...but I am not looking forward to take off.  

So "screen time" leads to less

conversation with your one to three year old? Who would have thought that? Really? Someone has done some "research"?

The article in the paper this morning has left me - bewildered? I would have thought it was obvious that young children, the one to three year olds in this study, were not interacting as much with an adult if they are looking at a screen. If they are not interacting then they will not vocalise as much. They will also hear fewer adult words and engage in less conversation. 

"Oh, he doesn't say much yet," is something I have heard sometimes. I have sometimes wondered about that. I have actually wondered, "Is this the result of being put in front of the electronic "babysitter"?  I have also wondered if it is something to do with being delivered to "day care", "child-minding", "preschool" or some other form of out of home care. Yes, some of that can be good, even very good. It can develop language in other ways. It can provide the vocabulary a child needs in order to begin school - but is it providing the one-on-one conversation a child once got at home when talking to an adult? I doubt it. How could that be provided in the same way? Surely it is something that teaches a child far more than the uniform vocabulary being taught in his or her other place of learning?

Children do not learn language in the way they once did. That's surely obvious? When children went to work instead of school they were surrounded by adult language and interacted with adults. It would be interesting to look at the differences in vocabulary use  between groups of children who live in places where the "employment" of children is still high and their counterparts who attend school.  I might be wrong but I suspect the "employed" children would use more words used by adults...simply because those are the words they would hear.

There are all sorts of claims made for having children in out-of-home care, including claims made about language development, but I do wonder how often this current generation of young children play with words the way we did. Why were the children I know so delighted when the Senior Cat recited nonsense rhymes to them? He was always shocked to realise they were not engaging in that sort of vital conversation. Yes, it is vital. Screen time cannot teach you to play with words the way we did.  

"We are here for the fibre confused"

I tell the bewildered looking person on the other side of the information "desk". 

There is a wry smile and yet another person asks another question. All this is hard work but good fun too. People have come to enjoy themselves.

Middle Cat and I spent the day at an event known as the "Fibre Feast". It is there for the purpose of buying and selling that all important commodity known as "yarn". It is vital to the life of those who knit, crochet, weave and work other miracles with long, thin, flexible strands of fibre.  

The event itself is a particularly well organised one. The people running it have been doing it for a number of years now. They put an enormous amount of work into it. Middle Cat and I went along to be an "information" stand. We were there to talk to people about the event itself, where to find things and who they should be talking to about the things they wanted.  

I had put in hours of work getting information together about patterns and where to find them because most of the stands sell yarn but they don't sell patterns. The sellers are often farm people, wool growers who sell their own yarn. Some of it comes from special breeds of sheep with their own special wool qualities. There are alpacas of various types too. This year there was someone who owns three camels and had some camelhair yarn. She had also imported some possum yarn from "across the pond" - New Zealand. There was silk and mohair and of course more and more wool mixed with all these things. 

"How much yarn do I need for....?" People kept asking this question. The answer to that often has first to be, "How long is a piece of string?" I talked people through, telling them where to find likely patterns, showing them the lists of likely sources. 

Middle Cat neither knits nor crochets - she draws and paints - but she can still encourage people to enter the RAHS Show. We both did all we could to encourage the men who expressed an interest. There was one cheerful young man in a wheelchair. He told us he had a disorder that we know is progressive but crochet is good therapy. He is also enthusiastic about it as he tells us what he has tried and wants to try. Put something in the RAHS Show? He had not thought of doing that - but if what he was wearing was any example then he should be showing things for the rest of us to see.

I caught up with some old acquaintances, people I only see at such events. My good friend W... who is almost 90 borrowed my walker to sit on for a while and showed someone how to solve their problem. Middle Cat distracted young children and dogs while their humans talked to me. Someone wandered through with two large parrots - one sitting on each shoulder. Another person came through with a guide dog in training. Later we provided "rest break" services to several stall holders who were there alone. 

By late in the afternoon the crowd started to thin out. I was almost hoarse with providing so much information. I left Middle Cat talking to someone about temper tantrums and alpacas and bought some yarn for a friend who could not get there. On the way back I stopped for a moment to talk to one of the organisers. Will we do it again next year? We looked at each other. Of course we will! 

A "scathing assessment" of

 Downunder? Apparently a Swiss tourist was asked for his thoughts about how this country is run...and what could be done to improve it. He had some interesting things to say about taxation (much higher here than in Switzerland) and resources (we have many).

There has been yet another discussion elsewhere about how many levels of government we have.

We have three main layers of government here. There is the federal government which deals with matters that are outlined in the Constitution. There are state governments (one for each state and territory). These are supposed to deal with things not in the Constitution and in cooperation with the federal government where things overlap. There is local government -supposedly there for roads, rates, rubbish and the like. All these things are supposed to work with one another, to cooperate.

Of course it does not work like this, especially when the federal government is one "flavour" and the state or territory is another "flavour" and the local government "councillors" are there because it is a stepping stone to a seat in parliament. 

We need a shake up, a big shake up. We need to be rid of at least one layer of government. It could be done. It would save millions of dollars. It would speed things up. It would bring in much more uniformity. This state has only just gone over to ending primary school at the close of year six instead of year seven. It has finally been brought into line with the other states. People fought it, said it wouldn't work and much more. From what I can see it seems to be working rather well.

We are also being told that uniform "planning laws" won't work because the needs of various communities are so different. Oddly enough we have wide ranging needs here and it seems to work. 

Perhaps it all made sense when communications were so much more difficult. Decisions needed to be made locally. There wasn't always time to get instructions from the other side of the country. Now there is no such difficulty. There are multiple means of getting in touch, with holding meetings and the like. 

But of course the state governments do not want to lose power. The immense duplication of services does not seem to worry them in the least. I do wonder though what would happen if it was put to a referendum. What would people decide it they were told a leaner system of government would ensure decisions were made much more rapidly and that it would give them thousands more in their pockets? 

So Facebook doesn't want to pay

for news content provided by other people?

The previous Downunder government tried this one with the "News Media Bargaining Code" and the result has been a $200m benefit to the news media in this country.  They no doubt will tell us that this has been a good thing. I also believe that you should pay to use something belonging to other people. 

But do people actually read the news on Facebook? I have a Facebook "account" but I don't actually read the news on it. I suppose I could look for it there but I can't be bothered. I have a paid subscription for the state newspaper and, because of my work, paid access to a number of other papers. I don't spend hours every day reading "the news" provided by them on line for free. I doubt many people do. There might be a few people who can get behind the various pay walls and other devices but that there might be so many doing this the government can demand Facebook pay for this is something I rather doubt.

I tend to be very cynical about things I read (or hear) on the media. My sources of news, real news, can sometimes be very different. There are journalists I trust to do the best they can but news gathering is a very difficult art, particularly in a war zone or a disaster situation - the sort of thing that makes the headlines all too often. Journalists will be relying on "sources" which are all too often not very reliable.  Even my sources, some of them in the very centre of a situation, are not "reliable" in that all they can give me is their point of view. 

I "pay" for my Facebook account by putting up with the advertising. I could put an "ad blocker" in place but advertisers do pay to put their content up and that is where the revenue to run the service comes from. Ignore the advertising and just read what you want to read is how I approach it.

What I do not want to pay for is government controlled "information". Our taxes are already supposed to pay for that. We have "the ABC" (the almost-equivalent of the BBC) and the various state newspapers. (Ours is actually - and very accurately - called "The Advertiser".) Our national newspaper is slightly different and the standard of journalism is perhaps a little higher. The newspapers are behind pay walls. I was not aware that Facebook was simply taking them and putting them out there for nothing. No, people here are doing that. They are putting things out there because they want us to know something or are trying to convince us of their point of view.  I am absolutely certain that Meta does not have someone sit down every morning and put these papers online. 

Are the governments opposing "free" information really more concerned about having to pay to disseminate propaganda rather than getting paid to disseminate it?

So, who is the spy or the traitor?

It is a question a lot of people are asking right now. The head of ASIO, the Downunder "intelligence" service, has said that a former politician used his/her position to "spy" for another country. Apparently the politician in question passed over information to another country, information they should have kept to themselves.

Now people are demanding to know who that person is or was. I can actually think of a few who might well have been the person in question. I don't think anyone doubts which country was involved. Nor do I doubt that this sort of thing is still going on. 

It is still going on but a good deal more discreetly and subtly than before. People who are accused of such behaviour do not always realise they are giving away such information. Many of them, although not all, would be appalled to think they had actually done something which might harm their country.

Over the course of my work I have signed more than one "official secrets document"...at least that is how I will put it. It sounds dramatic but all it means is that I have undertaken to keep any information I might gain in the course of my involvement to myself. It has not been difficult to keep those undertakings because I have usually been very low down the line of "people who matter". I do not have a high level security clearance of any sort. If I did I most certainly would not be talking about it. I might well have been - or would be - putting someone else's life at risk. 

So why do people do it? The obvious answer is "money" of course but there are also people who do it because their allegiances lie elsewhere. There are still others who do it because they are afraid not to do it. They are afraid of harm which might be done to others they love or of the potential damage to their own reputation.

Demands to know who the person was or is are to be expected. Do we have a right to know? The answer to that is not straightforward. The ASIO boss says the person in question is no longer involved and that the present laws were not in place at the time of the behaviour. He says nothing can be done. Perhaps that really is the case. There is also something else which occurs to me and that is the involvement of a third country, a security partner. They may well know what is going on, almost certainly do, but they may not want it known either. 

Whatever occurred we are not likely to know. The real problem is that not knowing "who" leaves every former and present politician in the country under the questions, "Is or was it you?" and "What did you know about it?"