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Written by Garry

Created: 22 August 2010

I'd be a pretty rubbish blogger if I didn't post something about the Australian Federal Election, especially given the dramatic result (at the time of posting I'm still not exactly sure who the prime minster is).

But, to be honest, like most Australians I am utterly sick of the whole thing. It seems to me that a hung parliament is pretty representative of a country that in the end, couldn't decide which party was less rubbish, and accordingly voted them both out.

And that's about all I have to say on the subject. In the meantime, remember: if at first you don't succeed, skydiving is probably a bad idea.

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Garry with 2 Rs

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Written by Garry

Created: 10 August 2010

This morning I was surprised and slightly confused to read about the current policy priorities for indigenous Australians being championed by Amnesty International.

Let me state from the outset that I am generally a fan of Amnesty, and support them financially on a monthly basis. But I’m not entirely sold on this morning’s effort. I appreciate the concern, and it’s certainly a good thing that someone out there is looking out for the rights of indigenous Australians. I would just rather a slightly more realistic and pragmatic approach be taken.

Claire Mallinson, speaking on behalf of Amnesty, told ABC reporters that the Northern Territory Intervention is discriminatory and a violation of human rights. In particular, she was concerned about the basics card. You can find a summary of Amnesty's position here.

And now: Some background.

In 2007 in the lead up to his last federal election, then Prime Minister John Howard announced a national emergency response based on a report into child abuse and other social issues affecting remote indigenous communities. Given the timing of the announcement, it was difficult not be a little cynical about the politics involved in the scheme. Also, activist groups in southern states (made up largely of white uni students who had never met an aborigine in their lives) started jumping up and down, decrying the racist imperialism of the Howard Government, foaming at the mouth and falling over backwards.

Since all that went down, very little has changed. Standards of living in remote communities are still ridiculous in comparison to even the dodgiest houses in major cities. Amnesty International is, quite rightly, pretty annoyed about that.

One change that has been implemented is the Basics Card, which is an income management tool that helps to ensure money in remote communities is being spent on food and utilities and not on gambling, alcohol or other problematic social habits. Given the extent to which the issues of neglect and child abuse are interwoven with alcoholism, gambling, substance abuse and domestic violence (to say nothing of cultural disenfranchisement and wholesale national indifference) this makes a lot of sense, and by and large the response I have seen in my travels to remote communities is that the basics card has been helping a lot and the elders are keen to continue using it in communities where the difficulties in spending money wisely have as much to do with appalling levels of literacy and numeracy as with criminal neglect.

So I was a little surprised to read that Amnesty was so vehemently opposed to it. Their argument is that it is discriminatory and needlessly restricts the freedom of those for whom the program is implemented. And admittedly, it doesn’t help matters that the anti-discrimination laws had to be revoked in order to institute a program that specifically targets aboriginal communities. To find out more, I did what I always do when I’m politically confused: I paid a visit to my friendly local shopping centre charity spruiker.

Garry: Can you tell me why Amnesty are opposed to the Basics Card?
Amnesty Girl: The main problem is that it makes life more difficult for people in remote areas. Women in those areas used to pool their money and once a month go shopping and buy all their groceries in bulk. You can’t do that with the basics card. Also, it’s discriminatory. We feel it’s not right that this system be imposed on Aboriginal communities and not everyone else.
Garry: Surely the basics card is more about preventing the money being spent on gambling or petrol sniffing or something, than fostering convenient shopping arrangements.
Amnesty Girl: The intervention was aimed originally at reducing child abuse. We feel that imposing this restriction on aboriginal communities simply because they are aboriginal does nothing to prevent child abuse.
Garry: But aren’t all these problems interlinked?
Amnesty Girl: Of course. But it’s discriminatory to apply it only to communities because they’re aboriginal. We have problems with child abuse where I’m from, but the Government doesn’t make us use basics cards.
Garry: Where are you from?
Amnesty Girl: New South Wales.
Garry: …
Amnesty Girl: Did you know that Northern Territory has the highest instance of alcohol abuse in the world?
Garry: Yes I did (it was also in the news this morning).
Amnesty Girl: So why don’t they just put us all on Basics Cards?
Garry: Thanks for your time.

The answer to her question is that in larger cities and even in regional New South Wales there is considerably more access to police, health services, counselling services and financial management assistance than there is in East Arnhem Land. It’s not discrimination to tailor specific solutions to specific communities with specific (and chronic) needs. In fact it’s called good governance. To regard me, with my privileged upbringing and tertiary education, as requiring the same care and attention as those bought up in near enough to third world conditions isn’t social justice; in fact it’s called idiocy. Aboriginal people need our support and it is our moral responsibility to provide it, antidiscrimination laws be damned, not least because it’s was us that screwed them out of their land and culture in the first place.

I could have stayed to argue with Amnesty Girl, but I was running out of lunch hour. Also, I’ve been watching old episodes of The West Wing, and couldn’t help but feel it was more Lymanesque to simply end the conversation and walk off smugly in the knowledge that I was much better informed and vastly more intelligent. Furthermore, I needed to return my James Bond comic to the library.

And now: Number one - The Larch

Garry with 2 Rs

P.S. I realise the Amnesty International link is quite dated. By the time I got back to news.com.au to find the quote from this morning, it had been deleted. I'm not sure what to make of that.

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Written by Garry

Created: 18 August 2010

Albert Einstein told us that time is relative.

Douglas Adams told us that time is an illusion (and lunch time doubly so).

The Doctor told us that time is more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.

And clever scientists at the Secret Institute for Abstract Thought Experiments have measured the speed of time at a constant velocity of one second per second. However, anyone who has attempted to meet a deadline on an assignment while simultaneously waiting for mince to defrost in the microwave will realise that this assertion is questionable at best.

Last weekend some blast-from-the-past friends of mine and I met up for a ten year high school reunion. Sitting around a dinner table at the Trailer Boat Club and seeing how everyone’s lives have changed since the last time we were all together (spouses, babies, new jobs, new hats etc.), I came to realise just how long ten years can be in human terms. Or indeed, any other terms for that matter. Despite all beginning at a common origin, all my classmates lives have taken them to remarkably different places.

We had people flying in from East and West (but all obviously from a Southern kind of slant given Darwin's location) but the most interesting kick was how many of us still live in Darwin (or have returned to Darwin, in my case). Given how much we used to whinge and whine about Darwin back in the day, I think the amount of us that now call this place home either serves to illuminate the awesomeness of Darwin, or the lack of ambition in the class of 2000. I like to think it's the former.

Coincidentally on the same weekend as the reunion, the school itself had an open day to go and check the current generation of students out. Walking around the same courtyards and walkways where we so often ran, hid, created mayhem and occasionally studied I was amazed to discover that the same period of ten years seems to have gone by in the blink of an eye. The drama room in particular, whose construction I was around for and took full advantage of, gave me the distinct sensation that I had been there for my year twelve production only yesterday.

One possible explanation for this apparent temporal paradox, not to mention the discrepancy between time measured in standard Open Day Inspection Seconds (ODIS)and Empirical Trailer Boat Club Wine Glasses (TBCWG) is the space-time vortex that was well known to have been built into the old demountable block we spent our upper primary years in. That particular architectural feature was what made it possible to make a lunch hour stretch from forty minutes to three years, and also made it possible, when necessary, to teleport from the music room at the other end of the campus back to your classroom without being intercepted anywhere in between (a very useful trick if you weren’t supposed to be in the music room in the first place). I think it also used to bend the shape of space near the canteen, so you never did quite know for sure how long the queue was.

I don’t know how they managed to create such a vortex. Somehow the unique mix of medium density fibreboard and asbestos dust must have reacted at a subatomic level, warping the distributed space differential back along the pavlovian antecedent tangent and making a … vortex.

And then the crazy fools went and tore the building down! God only knows what primal and chaotic universal forces they unleashed when they removed those demountables. Not to mention the smell. Those of us who made the trip out to the open day were shocked and appalled to discover the backdrop to so many childhood memories had been reduced to a bare patch of (extremely) disturbed soil, ready to receive a brand new library courtesy of some economic stimulus money from the former Prime Minister. It sounds great until you realise that future generations have lost the chance to experience the thrill and trepidation that comes from crawling fifteen metres under a dusty (and indeed, temporally paradoxical) building to retreive a monumentally misdirected soccer ball. Thanks for nothing Kevin; you've lost my vo... never mind.

Well whatever. It’s possible those same primal forces were responsible for the curious feeling of time flowing past at an inconstant rate as I sat at the Trailer Boat Club and tried to get my head around all my contemporaries' kids' names. It’s also possible the effect could be put down to a nice shiraz with old friends and a glorious sunset.

Or both.

…

Garry with 2 Rs

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Written by Garry

Created: 28 July 2010

Last weekend Darwin Memorial Uniting Church, the church I was brought up in, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its building’s construction. It was quite a grand affair with performances from the Darwin City Brass Band and the Darwin Chorale, as well as visits from past and present clergy and the odd politician not to mention my family, who made the trip up from Adelaide for the weekend. Fifty years might not sound like much, but in a city that was blown up by the Japanese in 1942 and then blown down by Cyclone Tracy in 1974, a building with some staying power is something to celebrate, especially given the rate at which the city skyline is changing.

Since arriving back in Darwin in November, I’ve been heard to say that walking back into my old church after nine years was a bit like stepping back in time. The same faces were all there to welcome me to the same style of service and same music that we were singing the day I left oh so many lifetimes ago. Having been associated with the congregation since I was born, I really got a sense of having been part of the congregation forever.

It blew my mind and put me right back in my place to see how many people attended the celebration who have been around the church since it was opened in 1960 and had also been part of the seed congregations that went before it. It gave me a real sense of continuity, and of being part of something much larger than even my whole lifetime. Of course, most things in the universe are much larger than my lifetime, but in a society that prides itself on constantly advancing and changing, it was comforting to know that at least some human endeavours have the ability to stick it out.

One of the more moving aspects of the celebration was the music. Someone had managed to dig up copies of music which was composed and performed especially for the opening of the church fifty years ago. As far as anyone knows, it hadn’t been performed again since, until someone slipped a copy to the brass band. Listening to the same arrangement of Abide With Me blended with The Last Post (the church building also serves as a war memorial) that had been played fifty years ago gave me the same sort goose bumps as opening a time capsule, or stepping out of the DeLorean after a flux capacitor malfunction.

Having celebrated the past, the capstone of the weekend was an open discussion on what the future might hold for Uniting Church in Australia. It was fascinating to hear different people’s ideas on what the church might become once the mysterious and unpredictable under 30’s crowd inherit control. I have my own ideas on that front, and I'm planning on putting my grand takeover plan into effect sometime in the next few months. Watch this space.

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Garry with 2 Rs