Flagging Loyalties

I wonder when we will be mature enough to have our own national flag – a flag that doesn’t symbolically kowtow to another country?

We are, after all, one of very few counties in the world that appropriates someone else’s flag as part of its own.

In the case of the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 54 independent sovereign states, besides Australia, only New Zealand and Fiji are still attached to the symbolic apron strings.

Fiji has the Union jack on its flag – but then Fiji was suspended from the Commonwealth on September 1st 2009, so maybe it doesn’t count.

The question needs to be asked. Why is the Union Jack on our flag? Sure, we were settled/colonised (use whichever term causes least offence) by the British. But that was over 220 years ago, and the world has changed a bit since then.

I doubt that the majority of Australians see the symbolism of the national flag as a high order issue. The only time it’s flown by Joe average is on Australia day, and often the way it’s done (wrapped around a boozy Bogan or stuck in the door frame of a ten year old Commodore on a Made in China marketing exercise) does no-one any credit.

My ancestors are Irish. They came over in the 1860s, driven from their native land by a combination of famine and British indifference. I feel no loyalty to anything or anyone from blighty.

I feel more affinity with the traditional Irish song Foggy Dew, about the Easter Rising of 1916. An extract –

“Oh the night fell black and the rifles' crack Made perfidious Albion reel".

Not much loyalty expressed there.

The English, after all, reneged on the Treaty of Limerick of 1691, which ended the war between the Catholic Jacobite forces and the English loyal to William of Orange. The terms of this treaty were relatively favorable to the Irish. Catholics were given freedom to worship, own property and carry arms.

The English went back on their word in the Penal Laws of 1695, and the Irish were treated as second class citizens for centuries.

Why would I feel any loyalty to them?


My preferred flag is on the title page of this blog. The Eureka flag represents an authentic proud and courageous response to tyranny.

It's good to see Ray Martin agreeing with me. Thanks Ray.




I’d rather resist than kowtow.

And then there’s the current dreary national anthem…… “Song of Australia” (tune of “Waltzing Matilda”) beats it hands down.


I know which one I’d rather march to…..

Ma and Pa Kettle?

For a number of years now I’ve been working what could be considered a second career after retiring from full-time work in 2005.

I find that for the moment at least I need the challenge and stimulation of paid work, and despite the other things I enjoy, because I’m not obliged to anyone else but myself to see them through to a conclusion, I often get bored with them. This is true for blogging, as much as anything else.

As well, these other pursuits tend to be solitary. I need to work with people in a team – I always have, and it’s hard to shed old habits.

The only downside to the part-time work is that it takes me away from home for days at a time, which leaves my bride at home by herself, because all the kids have flown the nest.

Whilst she doesn’t mind this, we’ve always looked for opportunities to work together.

One has come up, and we’ve grabbed it with both hands.

We’re a bit fortunate. As products of the seventies, when the Education Department took already qualified teachers offline for a year and trained them in post-graduate qualifications in specialised areas, we both have these qualifications and between us seventy years of experience.

My area is physical impairment, my wife’s visual impairment.

Given the enormous difficulty in filling these positions in the bush, we’ve both now been signed up as itinerant specialists supporting schools west of here.

At this stage, my bride works only two days a fortnight, but I’m hopeful that she will warm to it and be prepared to take on more. I’m happy with five days per fortnight.

If we organise it properly we will be able to travel together, thus saving the agency quite a few dollars in vehicles and accommodation, even if at this stage it will be only one job in three.

On the occasions when we work together, the question “How was your day?” will become redundant.

Having said that, whilst we’ve been married thirty-three years, we’ve never actually worked together.

Could be interesting……

I’ll keep you posted.

Hedge Trimming – Vietnamese Style

There's a fascinating story coming out of Vietnam at the moment.

Luong Hoai Nam, a senior Vietnamese executive from Jetstar Pacific Airlines, was arrested on January 7th in connection with the loss of $34 million US dollars when some fuel hedging transactions went badly wrong. Qantas subsidary Jetstar Pacific is majority owned by State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC), an investment arm of the Vietnamese government.

In addition, two Australians, Qantas executives Daniela Marsilli and Tristan Freeman have not been formally charged but were forced to spend Christmas in Vietnam and are still prevented from leaving the country. They apparently were involved in the transactions which are the subject of an enquiry.

It’s doubtful that the story would have made the Australian media if locals hadn't been detained, and the involvement of the Australians doesn’t get a mention in the report in Vietnam Net.

For those of you (like me) who are either bored or disinterested in the shonky carryon that masquerades as high finance these days, this explanation by Henry Blodget writing in Slate might be helpful. It’s interesting that it was written in 2006.

The article is called - Risky Business The real reason for the latest hedge-fund disaster.

An aggressive trader places risky bets, gets lucky, and makes himself and his bosses rich. The bosses, eager to keep the gravy train rolling, let the trader make bigger, riskier bets (and, in this case, give him a reported $75 million to $100 million bonuses nd his own personal trading floor). To head off concerns that they are taking big chances, the bosses extol their risk controls and "multi-strategy" expertise. Then the trader makes some huge, risky bets, gets unlucky, and loses $6 billion in a few weeks.

So basically, extravagant risks are taken with other people’s money, and sometimes it all goes bad.

I love the spin the Australian has put on the Vietnamese story -

But there have been suggestions the arrest may be part of a wider backlash from old-school communists unhappy with the partnership with private enterprise.

If by “private enterprise” they mean the freedom to throw away hundreds of billions of hard-earned Dong*, then I too must be “old-school”.

Having lost a six-figure sum in the last twelve months in my (very cautious) super investments, as a result of the GFC, I’m old-school enough to suggest that it’s not OK to take risks with other people’s money, and when it all goes pear-shaped, to pocket your bonus and skedaddle.

I’m a lot better off than the poor sods who were caught in the Storm Financial scam – but then I wasn’t looking for extravagant profits, nor was I taking much risk. Nevertheless I was caught in the collapse, as were many other self-funded retirees. My balances are heading up again, but I doubt that the shonks (most of them on the other side of the Pacific) have taken any pain.

I’ve flown domestically (Vietnam Airlines) quite often in country. They come across as a very professional outfit, and their fleet is state-of-the-art and pretty new – mostly Airbus A321. The only exception was a trip from Da Nang to Hue on a rather noisy ATR 72. Maybe all ATRs are noisy.

There’s a great deal of money to be made catering to Vietnam’s burgeoning tourist industry. The Vietnamese are easy going, hard working and very entrepreneurial, but they can’t abide shonks.

The action of the “Communist” administration of Vietnam is quite instructive when it comes to dealing with crooks. They could teach a thing or two to governments in this country and the USA as to how to handle “masters of the universe” who lack any form of moral compass.

It’s unfortunatel that a couple of Australians were caught up in it. Having said that, iIf they behaved ethically they won't have anything to worry about.
*1 AUD = 16887.9871 VND - 09.01.10

A Whale of a Time

The current controversy about anti-whaling activity in the Southern Ocean is a great example of interest groups taking a stand on an issue at great cost to reason and logic.

In the first place, we need to look at the position of the Japanese whalers. Note that I use the term “Japanese whalers”, not “Japanese people”. This is because aaccording to an opinion poll conducted in Japan in June 2006, 69% of Japanese people do not support whaling on the high seas and 95% never or rarely eat whale meat.

So there is a distinction, and most Japanese wouldn’t be upset if whaling ceased tomorrow.

I’ve heard it said that slaughtering whales to eat their meat is an important aspect of Japanese culture. It isn’t.

Whaling in Japan began only a few centuries ago. It started at the same time as the whaling traditions of Britain, the Netherlands and other European countries. The industry in Japan is centered on a few coastal communities. Whaling in the southern ocean by Japanese did not begin until the 1930s, and was expanded massively following World War II following encouragement from General Macarthur, as a means of feeding a starving population. There’s no starvation in Japan now.

Japan has more than 4,000 tons of whale meat from its whaling program in cold storage. It can’t be sold because the demand isn’t there. If you asked a young Japanese to eat whale meat you’d get much the same reaction as you would from a young Aussie. My daughter spent some time in Japan the year before last on an exchange, and she reported that most of her Japanese friends regard the whale hunt as embarrassing and don’t like to talk about it. They see it as a stupid anachronism embraced by old people living in the past.

The fact that it is defended by the Japanese government stems from the same vein of Japanese nationalism that continues to deny the atrocities committed by the Japanese military in World War 2.

The Japanese call their whaling activity research. It isn’t.

All the data that needs to be collected about whale populations can be gathered without killing whales. Despite the signage, a glance at the specifications of the vessels they use gives the lie to the “research” myth. They are highly developed fishing vessels with massive storage and butchering capacity.

Most of the western world disapproves of Japanese conduct in maintaining a whaling fleet. Ronald Reagan had something to say on this in reference to the US Exclusive Economic Zone in 1988 -

Given the lack of any evidence that Japan is bringing its whaling activities into conformance with the recommendations of the IWC, I am directing the Secretary of State under the Packwood-Magnuson Amendment to withhold 100 percent of the fishing privileges that would otherwise be available to Japan in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone. Japan has requested the opportunity to fish for 3,000 metric tons of sea snails and 5,000 metric tons of Pacific whiting. These requests will be denied. In addition, Japan will be barred from any future allocations of fishing privileges for any other species, including Pacific cod, until the Secretary of Commerce determines that the situation has been corrected.

So in summary, the Japanese don’t need to continue whaling for any reason other than the assertion of national pride. They’re quite prepared to do it in the face of international opinion and in waters a long way from home.

The activists, on the other hand, are quite happy to use every opportunity to spin most aspects of their activity without a great deal of recourse to fact. They claim that the end justifies the means. Their mainpulation of the media on this issue provides a case study.

In this country, both sides of politics have used the issue as a political wedge. Labor has been more successful at this than the coalition, but in recent months, Greg Hunt has sounded very much like he’s a signed-up member of Greenpeace.

The conservative commentators look pretty silly on this issue. They poke fun at activists, which is what conservatives do, irrespective of the issue, because of an ingrained fear of subversion.. Their line of reasoning is difficult to follow, unless it derives from the notion that nothing should be allowed to interfere with the sanctity of commerce so long as something - anything is being bought and sold.

It’s the “Blackwater” defence. Any activity, no matter how despicable, when called "commerce" by definition becomes sacred, and is exempt from moral/ethical principles. Despite their loud protestations that AGW is a religion, this dogma claiming inherent sanctity of the market resembles nothing so much as a fundamentalist strain of religion.

So where do we go from here?

Some naïve suggestions –

Employ the Navy to exercise in amongst the whaling fleet. They wouldn’t/couldn’t be tasked to arrest and detain – just to run interference. With the assets they have at their disposal in terms of state of the art communications, air capability, agile vessels and highly-trained matelots, they could provide such an embuggerance to the Japanese whaling operation that it would make what Sea Shepherd has been able to do look like a Sunday school picnic.

It would be great training for the sailors, would provide them with a real-world challenge. Taxpayers dollars needed to fund fisheries surveillance would be saved. The exercise could be financed out of the training budget. In the absence of a more appropriate name, such an operation could be called “Buggerup 1”. Giving it a number would provide a message that it may be the first of many.

A medal could be issued – the Southern Ocean Buggerup Campaign medal. The matelots could wear it with pride. It would induce more adrenaline than rounding up refugees.

The Japanese couldn’t complain. Any objection from their government could legitimately be met with the response – “The RAN is carrying out training in the Southern ocean”.

This would hold as much water as the Japanese saying “We are carrying out cetacean research in the Southern ocean”.

This strategy would create a swift resolution one way or another and the whalers and the activists could all go somewhere warm. The Japanese would throw a tantrum or two, but in the end the pressure which would be brought by Japanese financiers standing to lose if their government took sanctions against Australia would win the day.

Or we could all stop buying Toyotas.

That would at least decrease the number of household appliances masquerading as motor vehicles on Australian roads.

Sanity in Retrospect

Mike Steketee writes in today’s Australian on the topic of refugees.

Towards the end of his article he compares the Fraser government's approach to the arrival of boat people in the seventies to that applying in the current political climate -

A few factors worked in Fraser's favour. One was the sentiment that Australia had a moral obligation to help the victims of a war in which we had fought. It was an argument he put forcefully, together with his admiration for the refugees. "If you embrace a positive view and embrace the courage of the people who are prepared to try and get a better life for themselves and their families, I think the political pressure starts to diminish," he says.
The contrast, of course, is with the Howard government, which pandered to the fear following 9/11 that Iraqis and Afghans fleeing by boat included terrorists (ASIO did not reject a single person on these grounds). Yet Australia's moral obligation was as strong as that following the Vietnam war: the refugees were fleeing Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, who the Howard government thought sufficiently reprehensible to wage war against. But the government never put the argument.
The key factor in resolving the issue in the 70s was an international agreement that stemmed the flow from Vietnam but allowed large numbers of refugees to go to Western countries. Such co-operation, combined with humane treatment of asylum-seekers, is the best way to cut boat arrivals.

Fraser is also quoted in yesterday’s Canberra Times -

''It demeans Australia to be having a purely political argument on this subject. When I was prime minister, Gough [Whitlam] initially opposed accepting Indo-Chinese refugees but then he changed his position and we had a bipartisan agreement,'' Mr Fraser said.
''Turning the boats back is pure Hansonism, you could well ask what has happened to the Liberal Party. Abbott said he would consult, implying Turnbull didn't, but he has announced this policy and I doubt he had a cabinet meeting before announcing it.''

I’ve blogged on this before. The tragic outcome of Howard’s behaviour in 2001 is that the issue has been appropriated by the merchants of hate. It’s interesting to look back to what was a more enlightened time.

Aging is a Bugger

I’ve always believed that age is a state of mind. Until a few days ago, I was pretty comfortable in that belief.

I still do all the physical things I used to when I was 25. The difference now is that it takes much longer to recover.

This was brought home with a vengeance a few years ago when my bride and I took our two daughters on a holiday to Noosa. I had just “retired” so was looking forward to a holiday that would herald a new carefree lifestyle. After running a series of Special Schools for eighteen years, this release from responsibility looked pretty good.

My youngest daughter enjoys all manner of sporting activity, so we made use of both the tennis courts at the resort and the nearby beach break. I had always enjoyed body surfing and decided to give her some expert tuition.

After a morning (about three hours) on the tennis court and an afternoon in the surf, the four of us (bride and other daughter as well) went to a restaurant in the evening. This capped off a perfect day.

The next day was not so perfect. I woke up stiff and store, and by lunch time could barely move. My whole upper trunk was one massive ache generated by protesting muscles which had done little for months except manipulate a keyboard, and load stuff in and out of cars. They had not coped well with hours of tennis and surfing, and were letting me know in no uncertain terms.

My lower body, on the other hand was fine, as at that time I was jogging daily.

These days I walk.

I had to take a rain check on daughter’s requests for more of the same, and the BMW Z3 we’d hired for three days sat in the garage. I couldn’t lift my arms to the steering wheel.

It took about three days for the stiffness and aching to subside.

I was reminded of this during the last few days. On Sunday I gave the MX5 a good cleanup. The easiest way to clean the interior is to take the top down, and use a vacuum cleaner whilst standing outside the car. As I bent over with the nozzle to access a particularly hard-to-find corner, something on the lower right side of my chest let go.

I’ve been in pretty severe pain since. My complaints have generated lots of advice from my bride to visit the quack, but I’m aware that this will probably not be useful, as it’s a matter of giving the torn muscle time to heal. I’ve been to my GP with torn muscles before, and was told – not altogether sympathetically – “You’re getting older, you know – you can’t expect to be able to behave as you did when you were 30”.

He needed seven years of study to tell me this?

This particular muscle seems to be employed in everything I do, from cleaning my teeth to bending over to retrieve something dropped, so it aches pretty much all the time.

I couldn’t even take the garbage out last night.

Toowoomba

We’ve been living in this city for twelve years now – the longest we’ve ever stayed in one place.

My bride and I have lived in eleven different homes during our thirty-two years of marriage, and our four kids have attended a grand total of twelve schools. It was to slow down this rate of change that we settled in Toowoomba.

Places we lived in included Mount Gravatt, Petrie, Townsville (Kirwan and Rowes Bay), and Mount Isa (Sunset).

As it is, my eldest actually attended four different schools, but our youngest only two, because we had stopped moving by the time she was old enough for school. All of them attended both state and private schools.

I don’t think the moving around did any of them any harm. My dad was a bush principal, and I also attended a range of different schools, both public and private all over the state. My kids have done the same.

Toowoomba, we found, is different.

After Mt Isa and Townsville, settling in Toowoomba felt a bit like time-travel (backwards). The Northern towns and cities had a completely different atmosphere. There was a rapid turnover of people, and few remained long enough to develop a sense of entitlement.

I first encountered this sense of entitlement at work, when I tried to introduce a few (small) changes. The resistance was amazing. I learned quickly that it paid to hasten slowly.

An interesting example of this was a suggestion I made that we could take a class of kids on an excursion to Longreach. We had a school bus – I had a licence to drive it, and had developed a lot of strong contacts in Longreach in my time working out there. Longreach has a lot of interesting educational venues (Stockman’s Hall of Fame, Qantas Museum etc). The Principal of the Longreach School of Distance Education at the time offered the school facilities for free lodging.

My teachers simply refused to cooperate, so I let the idea go. I discovered later that of a staff of about thirty, less than five had actually travelled West of Dalby (90kms down the road). There was a belief that if you went too far West there was a strong possibility that you would fall off the edge of the map. Longreach was simply incomphrehensible.

Last week, a teacher retired from a suburban Toowoomba primary school. The write-up in the local rag (Toowoomba Chronicle) pointed out that that she had worked on the same class in this school for forty-two years!

Only in Toowoomba.

Perhaps the best way of describing the culture is to recount an incident that happened in my second year here (1997).

At about eight in the morning I received a phone call from one of my teachers who had been involved in a prang on his way to work. He’d phoned to say that he was OK to come to work and teach, but his car was badly damaged and undriveable.

I offered to collect him (the accident was a few blocks from school) and drove to the intersection where he was waiting. It had been a pretty nasty incident, and one of the people in the other car had been injured. Fuel was also leaking from one of the cars.

This meant that the Police, Ambos and Fire and Rescue were all attending, so there was a fair bit of congestion at the intersection. I elected to park away from the corner to avoid all this, and pulled up in front of a house about a hundred metres up.

I was immediately confronted by a middle-aged woman in night attire and slippers, who angrily demanded to know why I had parked in front of her house. I explained the situation, and once she understood that there was a bit of excitement happening, she stopped abusing me and took off at a gallop towards the accident. A number of things were apparent – she had little better to do than abuse people she didn’t know who parked on a public road in front of her house, but was always ready to be distracted by a little bit of drama.

Once this mindset is clear, understanding Toowoomba becomes easy. The editor of the local paper understands it very well, and sells lots of newsprint covered with stories about lost dogs and minor accidents.

You can draw a line down Ruthven Street (the main drag) and this neatly separates old Toowoomba from new Toowoomba. East of the line is new (and generally of a higher socio-economic standing) and West of it is old. Attitudes about most things are strongly conservative irrespective of socio-economic circumstances, although Toowoomba North is a Labor seat. Toowoomba was the heartland of the Labor split in the fifties, and some of the old DLP views persist to this day. The recent sad story of abuse at a local Catholic primary school could only have happened here.

Only in Toowoomba could a pressure group called “Citizens Against Drinking Sewage” be formed and exert enough influence to put the kibosh on a scheme which would have saved Toowoomba residents a fortune in water rates.

Having said that, it is a great place to live. Most costs (except water) are low, it’s usually a little cooler that the coast because of its elevation, and it has more schools per square kilo than just about anywhere else in Queensland (with the possible exception of Charters Towers).

It’s also a convenient stepping off place to destinations South and West, avoiding the congestion of the area around Brisbane and Ipswich.

There are even some half-decent restaurants, but I still have to drive to Brisbane (or Charleville) for Vietnamese dosh. You can get good Thai tucker at the Hot Basil Thai Cottage and Pandan Delight.