Goodbye Chainsaw

Our local federal member, Ian Macfarlane, has announced his retirement from politics.

I’ve had a fairly long and interesting relationship with this bloke. The first time I met him was when he came to my school to present us with a new flag. He managed this with ease and grace. Not every politician is comfortable in the company of people with disabilities. Chainsaw was.

The next time was in 2003, when he was handing out commemoration of national service medals in Toowoomba. I believed at the time (and still do) that the timing of these presentations and Australia’s commitment to the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq was more than coincidental. In hindsight, that commitment was a mistake, as was the whole Iraq debacle, but there you go. I reckon that the medal presentations were part of gingering up the electorate to support our intervention, and resented being used again (as I had been in 1970) as political fodder. Consequently, my public refusal of the medal made the front page of the local rag, with a photo, and chainsaw was the unwitting victim of my small protest.

I always felt a little uneasy about this, so when I was ready to publish “Jellybeans in the Jungle” and was looking for someone to write an introduction, I asked him for a meeting. He agreed both to the meeting and the introduction, which was generous behaviour given what had preceded it. He was an honoured guest at the launch.

Since then, he has been shafted twice by his party, but each time, took it in good grace, and doesn’t appeared to have harboured any grudges. He is indeed, a rare bird in national politics, in that he has always been fair dinkum in his quest for good and honest government, and though I have never voted for him (he’s in the wrong party), I respect his integrity and common sense.

Like Guy Fawkes, Chainsaw was one of the few who has entered parliament with honest intentions. Unfortunately, not many contemporary representatives seem capable of mature and respectful behaviour, and if the trend continues, our political life will eventually begin to resemble the circus that we see across the Pacific.

Goodbye, Chainsaw, and good luck. You will be missed.

A Ghastly Possibility

This might be seen as a joke, but it is frighteningly real, gentle reader.

If this lunatic gets the GOP nomination, Australians should agitate for a vote in the presidential election.

Can you imagine this as the leader of the free world?

Grammer (sic)

With spelling like that, the mark is F.

Our local rag, famed for stories about lost dogs, locals made good and unusual weather events, beclowns itself in spectacular fashion today.

A front page story about school league tables provides a wonderful example of unconscious irony when the spelling of the name of one of the posher schools in town is mangled.

I wonder where the copy writer went to school.

Back to the Future

Mowing is one of those fairly mindless tasks that we do over and over again - especially at this time of the year.

When I was a kid, I enjoyed the activity. My father was happy enough to see me doing it as it meant he didn't have to. Somehow my own kids weren't so naive.

Pushing a mower also meant that I had charge of a machine with a motor.

I graduated from mowers to tractors on my uncle's cane farm and then to motor cars before I hit my teens - but that's another story.

After sixty plus years of pushing motor mowers, I reckon it's time to try something different.

I'm not disposing of the trusty Victa - perish the thought - just giving it an offsider, if you catch my drift. The Victa still gets used, just not on the whole lawn and not so often.

It's no heavier to push than a powered mower, and on some grasses actually does a better job. My memories of the old cast iron  machines that were around before the days of the powered rotary are of heavy cumbersome monstrosities. This one isn't.

The dogs tolerate it more kindly than the powered machine which creates hysterical excitement in one and nervous shock in the other.

Like most objects you buy these days, it came in a box and had to be assembled. This wasn't difficult, even though the instructions read as though they'd been poorly translated from Russian or Urdu or something.

It doesn't make much noise, doesn't create dust when It's dry, and my bride was even disposed to push it the other day out of curiosity.

Now that's a positive development......
  

A Word from a Jesuit

Pic courtesy Eureka Street

This is well worth blogging.

It's an article from Eureka Street by Andrew Hamilton SJ, and pulls no punches in regard to the relationship between Christian teaching and refugee policy.

Perhaps it should be required reading for the alleged Catholics in the Turnbull ministry.

Some extracts -


The High Court decision on detention in Nauru was brought down just before the Christian season of Lent. It left the government free and determined to deport many young mothers and children to Nauru.
For the mothers and children deportation will bring new trauma with renewed threat to their already precarious mental health. For the Australian public it again makes us ask what brutality, even to children, we are ready to tolerate.But the naming of events can also shape the capacity of a society to respond to new challenges. The events of Bloody Sunday, for example, made it difficult to promote just and harmonious relationships between Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Island. Naming it Bloody Sunday, with its religious reference and ethical weight, made it even more difficult.

 And -

For the deportation of children and their mothers to Nauru, the story with most resonance is that of Herod's murder of the children around Bethlehem for dynastic, and so security, reasons.
The story gave rise to a feast remembering the children killed — the Holy Innocents. Story and feast stand as an assertion of the dignity of each human being, especially the smallest and most vulnerable, and as a condemnation of political brutality.
The story also warns the government of unintended consequences. If public outrage at the brutality involved in the deportation of children to Nauru leads government leaders and ministers to be identified with King Herod or similar monsters, they may lose the moral authority and respect they will need to carry through difficult decisions.
In times favourable to them this may not be a disaster. But at a time when the challenges facing Australia demand strong leadership and policies that will inevitably anger powerful interests, government leaders will need strong moral capital and support from across society.

Read the whole piece here.


 

Outsourcing – a Cautionary Tale

Pool at the Tambo Mill

Readers of this humble blog would know that I travel a great deal in South Western Queensland for a large, and fairly unwieldy government bureaucracy.

Until recently, the arrangements for this travel (motel bookings and the like) were done locally. It was a simple exercise. You completed a form, available as an Ms Word template, and emailed it to the local officer who authorised it and made the booking with the relevant motel.

In the eight years I’d been using it, I can’t remember one failed or missed booking. There was always a bed waiting at the end of the day – a thoroughly reliable service.

The moteliers liked it because there was no cost to them.

Then Noddy Newman’s government came into power in 2012. Fairly early in his term, his government sacked 13000 public servants. One of them was the officer who did the travel bookings. Now these sackings were carried out ostensibly to save money, so it would have been logical to assume that henceforth we would make our own bookings. It took, after all, one phone call, once we’d secured approval based on our travel diaries.

Not so.

The Newman government outsourced the travel bookings to a Sydney based agency as part of their policy settings based on "small government". This agency was, after all, a private corporation, so it stood to reason that they would do a much better job than their public service counterparts.

I’ve been forced to use them since the beginning of 2015.

First of all, I had to be trained to use their website. When summoned to attend the training (during time I thought I could much more profitably use dong my real job) I protested, saying that I’d been around computer systems for a while, and could probably teach myself.

No – I had to attend. After the training session it became obvious why training was necessary.  I’ve used a few websites to book travel in my time, but this one is positively the clunkiest I have ever encountered. You need the patience of Job and a cut lunch to get it done.

Another problem was that the service was designed for the SES high rollers who stayed at metropolitan hotels in the various big smokes, and the relatively obscure hostelries I frequented simply weren’t on their database. Nobody in Sydney had heard of (for example) Tambo, let alone the excellent Tambo Mill Motel.

This meant that every time I needed to stay at one of the more remote locations in my caseload area, I had to phone the agency’s helpline and request they put the site on their database.

Then in August last year I rocked up at one of the places I frequented (St George) only to find that no booking had been made, despite my laboured input. I am a regular at this establishment, so they put me in my usual room, but I began to stop assuming that their system worked, and usually phoned ahead to make sure a booking was in the system.

To my cost, I didn’t phone ahead last week, and when I arrived at the hostelry I’d booked in Goondiwindi, they’d never heard of me. Same thing happened – I’m a regular and they found me a room, but now I have absolutely no confidence in the outsourced system. 

It turned out there was a booking, but at the wrong motel. I guess the agency assumes that one motel in Goondiwindi is as good as another, and all I had to do was ring around until I found the right one.

The moteliers hate the system, by the way, as it creams off a hefty commission.

I wonder how much the agency gets from the taxpayer for the contract, and I also wonder how many others are being stuffed around by an ideology that puts private profit before public service.

Ain’t outsourcing wonderful……..

Thanks Malcolm

NBN box thingy. They will do interior install in a week or two.

Two NBN hopey things happened this week.

First a gent with a clueboard turned up really really wanting my signature on the voluminous paperwork he was bearing.

A few days later, a couple of hi-vis wearing gents arrived and despite the swearing and abuse from the dogs installed the thing pictured above, and strung the wires leading to the cable on the phone/electricity poles to the house.

Apparently the two events were out of sequence, as the clueboard man looked a bit confused when he couldn't find the external box and wires.

It's all in the noble tradition of contractors. They don't talk to each other.

Anyway, we're signed up for the standard install, which means we bundle phone and internet together, and NBN provides us with a Telstra approved modem, which I have to set up myself.

We finish up with one phone station only, as against two under the old dispensation, but that's no problem in these days of wireless handsets (says he hopefully).

We were within a month of having the NBN installed when the Coalition came to power, and Malcolm's ordering that all contracts be cancelled and renegotiated is the reason for the delay.

On the upside, we get fibre to the house because the work in this neck of the woods had commenced on that plan, and it actually cost less to finish it than change it to the cheapskate model.

We also had to put up with intermittent internet during the six month period when the contractors were working on the network. Telstra got sick of me complaining so sent me a prepaid dongle as a back up.

I wonder will they want it back when the install is completed?