A Busy Box

The rope is for towing it.

About five years ago, I had to have a container fabricated to safely ship my eBay purchased hardtop (for the MX5) from Melbourne.

I googled a box-maker, and after sending him the measurements, he knocked up a very sturdy box.

When I say “sturdy”, I mean it was so heavy that it took two strong men to lift it, which created all manner of complications and delays. At various stages of shipping, it had to wait for a special truck with one of those inbuilt mini crane thingies or a hydraulic hoist attached. Ipec trucks are operated by one person.

Anyway, it arrived, and it had kept the precious (and vulnerable) hardtop safe.

Box (with hardtop inside) arrives.

After the top was sprayed the same hue as the MX5, it looked pretty good, and kept the car a lot more secure than the original.

Of course, I disposed of the MX5 some years ago, but the box lingered.

It was always a problem to store, so I dragged it into the backyard shed, where it did sterling duty as a storage for tools and things for a few years. It was narrow enough, stood on its side, to work as a container for heavy stuff, and left enough room for the ute.

Hardtop fitted.

With the onset of Spring, we always seem to get the urge to plant stuff. The local rag was giving away a whole lot of free seed as a promotion, so we found ourselves in possession of a range of vegetable seed varieties, many of which were new to me.

The problem with attempts to grow stuff at our place is always the dogs.

They dig stuff up, play weird games on any open area of soil, and eat anything that grows. This means that any garden has to be thoroughly dog proof.

I hit on the idea of using the box, but the problem of its weight remained. Then I thought about ways of making it mobile, so it could be moved around to take advantage of prevailing conditions.

Casters (available at half price from Masters because it’s going out of business) were the answer. They’re attached using coach screws. I put a rope on one end to make moving it by one person feasible, and will attach a roll of chicken wire across the top to discourage the dogs.

We’ll plant herbs and vegies. 

Mobile gardens are a thing.

Ming Misremembered

Image courtesy Loonpond.blogspot.com.au

John Howard has been hosting an ABC production called Building modern Australia - Howard on Menzies.

It is hagiography rather than history. Howard mythologies Menzies to the point that you find yourself waiting for the suggestion that he (Menzies – not Howard) should be canonized. I suspect that the only obstacle in the way of that suggestion is the fact that Menzies was Presbyterian and Howard (nominally) Anglican.

Howard forgets that some of us (and here I am giving my age away – gentle reader) lived through the Menzies era, or some of it.

To believe that everything was rosy during Menzies’ period as PM ignores the historical statistics.

When I was a kid, there was a joke doing the rounds about Bob Menzies. My Dad, who was not renowned for telling jokes, repeated it in my presence on a number of occasions.

It went something like this –

Bob Menzies was surfing at Bondi one Sunday when he was caught in a rip. It was early in the morning and no lifesavers were on duty. Menzies would occasionally take early morning swims to avoid the crowds.

A teenager – a strong swimmer - saw that he was in trouble, and swam out to his aid, dragging him to the beach.

An exhausted and grateful Menzies said to the youth – “Lad, you’ve saved my life. I am the PM; I can give anything you want. What can I grant you?”

After a brief hesitation, the teenager said – “Can you organise me a state funeral?”

“Certainly”, said Menzies, “but that’s a strange request for one so young. Why do you want a state funeral?”

“Because”, said the young man, “If my dad hears I’ve saved Bob Menzies, he’d kill me.”

Ming in his day was not as universally loved as Howard mythologizes.

His failures were many.

He did, in fact, run budget deficits for the last nine years of his reign. When he left office, national debt was running at 41% of GDP. His deficits were proportionally greater than those chalked up by Swan. Remember the bitter criticism of deficit budgets thrown at the Labor treasurer by Abbott, Howard, Hockey and Co. Apparently that practice was OK in Menzies' day.

  

In 1950 he attempted to ban the Communist Party. The Communist Party Dissolution Bill was passed by parliament. After it was enacted in October, the law was challenged in the High Court and, on 9 March 1951, was held to be unconstitutional. The Court ruled that parliament could not invoke its defence powers to rule an association unlawful when the nation was not at war.

(Menzies seemed to believe that what was possible in wartime was also a goer in times of peace. This eccentricity in policy making reared its head again when he introduced conscription in peacetime – but more on that later)

He had another go in 1951 and sought approval this time for the federal government to ban the Communist Party of Australia by referendum. It was defeated. This approach has an eerie similarity to what we've been hearing from One Nation about Muslims recently.

But back to conscription. Menzies introduced conscription in peacetime on November 10, 1964; the necessary amendments to the Defence Act were made on April 6, 1965. This was despite the fact that it had never been a feature of Australian defence policy before, and referenda on the issue, introduced by Billy Hughes, had twice been defeated in World War One. 

It’s not difficult to understand why Menzies didn’t take this issue to a referendum. Despite the hysteria about “Reds under the bed” that he, and later the DLP had whipped up at the time, a majority of Australians didn’t want a bar of it. This had become abundantly clear by the time of the 1970 Moratorium marches.

The act of introducing conscription in peacetime did more to alienate a whole generation of Australians towards the Coalition that anything before or since. That gets small mention in the TV series. 

I guess it wouldn’t neatly fit the narrative.

The fact That Menzies dodged service in the First World War is also omitted.

It’s hardly a surprise to see Howard rewriting history to deify his predecessor. He behaved very much like Menzies. The best examples of this are his approach to the US alliance. Menzies gave secret undertakings to the US that Australia would be prepared to give legitimacy to a much increased US involvement in Vietnam through provision of Australian troops₁. This was mimicked by Howard, nearly 40 years later in reference to Iraq.. 

The difference between Howard and Menzies was that the former wasn’t ruthless enough to send conscripts to fight in peacetime, or perhaps had learned from the history.

Howard, like Menzies, also whipped up fear to maintain power. In the case of Menzies, the target was Communism; in Howard’s case terrorism. 

There are some of us who have lived long enough to have seen it all before, and some of us that were part of that lost generation of conscripts...

1. WAR FOR THE ASKING: How Australia Invited Itself to Vietnam - Michael Sexton – New Holland - 2002

Tangled SSM Web

Courtesy Tandberg

Whilst this isn’t an issue that I’m deeply passionate about, it’s very important to many of my fellow Australians, and worth a comment.

Before he was dumped, Tony Abbott left a booby trap around this issue. Under pressure from the harpic* Right of his party, he came up with the idea of a plebiscite. Like most of the hyper partisan negative activity he introduced into Australian politics, it has taken on a life of its own – a bit like a fungus.

The effect of this was essentially to kick the issue down the road, whilst at the same time attempting to divide and rule his own party, so that the conservative tail was put in a position where it could effectively wag the moderate dog. Whilst Abbott couldn’t have foreseen that the Coalition would end up with a one-seat majority, that outcome has added another dangerous dimension to his trap.

To cap it all, this was to be a non-binding plebiscite.

Individuals like Tubby Christensen have finished up with a whole lot more power than their support warrants, and the threat of an alliance between him and One Nation has the government terrified.

With good reason – imagine what that unholy union could do to the country - talk about an alliance made in hell!

Anyway, Labor are also extracting every last piece of political advantage from the standoff.

I’ll give some advice to Shorten for free. 

He should negotiate with the Coalition, and set up two conditions for Labor’s support of the plebiscite. Mark Dreyfus is meeting George Brandis in Brisbane on Monday. Dreyfus should put these conditions on the agenda.

The first would be to remove the allocation of taxpayer funds from both the “yes” and “no” case proponents.  That would save money and potentially take some of the dangerous heat out of the lead-up. The Irish didn’t deem it necessary.

The second would be to make the outcome binding on all members of both parties, including the Coalition. They would be expected to vote in support of the plebiscite outcome, irrespective of private views.

Each of these conditions is completely fair, and doesn’t favour one side or the other.

I doubt that Turnbull has the power to agree, as he is effectively held hostage to the harpics, but at least his refusal to do so would expose for the voters to see, the political shenanigans behind the plebiscite notion.

It’s also worth noting that members of the LBGTI community have something in common with other minority groups – they have become political collateral. Politicians are quite happy to use them as ideological cannon fodder.

As a Vietnam veteran, I am very familiar with this process.

It’s time this cynical use of minorities was no longer part of Australian politics.

*Clean round the bend