Visitor 15,000

Welcome to visitor 15,000 who arrived this afternoon from Hong Kong, searching on Australian rankings.

Haneef Case: a failure in compassion - and common sense

I have said little on the case of Dr Haneef, largely because the issue was being well discussed elsewhere and there was little that I could add. Now I feel the need to add a couple of points.

The first was the apparent failure of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and indeed the medical profession more broadly defined to become involved in any way. Dr Haneef was a registrar and, I think, a member of the RACP's specialist training program. If this is true, I would have thought that the College would have a particular interest in the matter.

More broadly, the AMA did release a statement. This was limited and focused on the damage that was being done to our capacity to attract overseas trained doctors. So, and I may be unfair here, it seems to me that the two professional bodies with a direct interest in the matter failed to play any active role.

In saying this, I am not saying that they should have taken Dr Haneef's side in terms of innocence or guilt. I am saying that I think that they should have taken a more active interest in the process being applied.

As I see it, the Haneef case was first and foremost a failure in process. I am not referring just to the evolving fiasco of the charge itself, but to what I see as a more fundamental failure of compassion, common sense and plain good manners.

The matter began well enough in that both officials and ministers emphasised that those being questioned and especially Dr Haneef were entitled to the presumption of innocence. But then things started going off the rails as the media feeding frenzy increased. The presumption of innocence became lost in the noise and the apparent adoption of increasingly partisan positions.

I accept that this was a complex investigation. I accept that the apparent links to the UK bombings created reasonable suspicions that needed to be investigated. But think how much better off we would all have been if the heat had been kept out of the matter.

Consider this. What would have happened if from the beginning Mr Kelty had taken the public more into his confidence, explaining some of the complexities involved? What would have happened if he and relevant minsters had kept emphasising the presumption of innocence, had displayed a degree of humanity? I suspect that a lot of the heat would have gone from the process.

All this could have been done without affecting the investigation. Yet it was not. Take the case of Dr Haneef's flat. Obviously this had to be searched. Yet did it have to be left trashed? Surely with the presumption of innocence, the police also had a responsibility to see it tidied up?

The decision by Minister Andrews to revoke Dr Haneef's visa astonished me at the time. I had to assume that there was a lot more to come. It seems clear that we may never know this. In the meantime, I am left with the impression of a continuing mess.

Note that in all this I have made no comment on Dr Haneef's own position.

My focus is on an Australian process that has further damaged trust in the Government and the system, failed to achieve any tangible outcomes, created tensions between Australian and British authorities and damaged Australia's international reputation. All this could have been avoided with a better focus on process, a little compassion and a dash of old-fashioned manners.

I do not exempt Mr Rudd from this criticism. In his desire to play bib to Mr Howard's bub, he took Labor out of the equation. It would have been perfectly appropriate for him to make a few simple process comments, like the need to preserve the presumption of innocence, without in any way detracting from the need to protect Australia's national interest.

It seems clear that many Australians still support the argument that Mr Howard puts forward. But even the Government's strongest supporters will admit to a degree of discomfort at the though that it might all happen to them.

Postscript

As I write this, Minister Andrews is releasing some material on the Haneef issue. Note that I was very careful not to comment on the content of the case. I will review the material, but on the media details so far I see no reason to alter my process conclusions.

The Colours, Sounds and Smells of Australia

Yesterday I had to drive youngest down to Mittagong south west of Sydney to play hockey against Frensham. For those who are interested, you can find the remarkable story of Winifred West and the schools she founded here.

As I drove west along the expressway I noticed and welcomed the changing colours as the inland replaced the coastal strip. The grass became yellower and browner, the trees more olive.

We are all imprinted in ways we sometimes barely recognise by the sights, sounds, colours and smells of the immediate world in which we live and especially that in which we grew up.

Many years ago my grandfather addressing a meeting of NSW architects told them that God invented the country, man the city, while the devil invented the suburbs and built flats! This was a very particular view, but there is something to it.

I have a colleague who loves cities, their sights, sounds and especially smells. Just back from Hong Kong, he waxed lyrical about the city and its assorted smells. He loves crowded streets, the secret by-ways that you find, all the human variety of the big city. Crowds thrill him.

I, too, like cities. Like my colleague, I am fascinated by their infinite variety. I have also always been fascinated by the process of change within them. I accept that cities are a monument to man.

To me, the suburbs are not the city. As I drove west through miles of housing estates - the Sydney information sign now appears 60k down the highway - I thought of Los Angeles. To me, Los Angeles is the city you have when you are not having a city.

Now I am sure that there are many from LA who will rush to its defence. Yet when I first visited it with many dispersed points of call, a trip that required hours of driving across LA, I was struck by its non-descript urban sprawl, by the complete absence of any city centre, of the features that I thought of as city.

One weekend I hired a taxi and just told the driver to take me anywhere he thought was of interest. He thought he was in heaven, because it ended up a five hour trip. The next day some US colleagues took my colleague and I out for a very enjoyable day across LA. I found many things, the tar pits, Beverly Hills, Rodeo Drive, Venice, to be of interest. Yet it all just firmed up the view I had already formed about the place.

In saying all this, I am not knocking the suburbs.

Where I part company with my colleague who loves cities is that while I think that cities are great places to visit, I also think that that they are pretty awful places in which to live long term and especially bring up children. Those who love living in the suburbs and are very dismissive of city life all point to this.

To me, the best of all possible worlds would be something that combines city and country living.

I am an inland person. To me, the beach is something to visit on holidays, boring if one is forced to spend too much time there.

I love the sometimes subtle changes in the Australian country side associated with changing landforms, soils and climate. I love not just the natural landscape, but also the changes human occupation has imposed on the landscape. Here I part company with those who want to lock up the country as an unchanging preserve for mainly city visitors, who want to turn the country back to an idealised pristine version locked in time.

I also love the smells of the country. The crisp, cold smell of the Tablelands' air. The sometimes acrid smell of wood smoke. The smell of the gums. Rain on dirt.

There is a clarity to country light and also sounds lacking in the city. City visitors used to the constant background noise of the city, a noise that they tune out, are sometimes astonished at just how noisy the country can be. With the background noise removed, things like early morning bird song suddenly stand out. The sounds of trucks on a distant highway become very clear.

By contrast, I find that I cannot tune the city background noise out in the way that those born in the city can. At best, I can get used to it. Police sirens, garbage trucks, racing cars, alarms, the early morning start of buses, all intrude. My ears actually hurt, something I only really notice when the background noise is removed.

When I used to visit the city I enjoyed the noise, the bustle, the lights. I actually knew Sydney in particular very well, far better than most who lived there, because I used to explore the place.

On weekends I would sometimes drive for hundreds of miles, just exploring from the outer suburbs and rural outskirts through to all the lanes and byways of the inner city. I knew pubs, all the galleries, book stores, the places where different groups hung out, dozens of good eating places. To me, Sydney has become a much diminished place since I started living here.

Now I am the first to admit that circumstances change. When I first started coming to Sydney on a regular basis I was the age my daughters are now. They do some, not all, of the things that I used to do. This is very different from trying to combine work and family responsibilities while living in a place.

For the present, my dream of finding a way to combine city and country living must remain just that, a dream. But still, who says we can't dream?

The Past is Not Always Better - and the University of Blogging

Rereading my last post, I suppose that I should make it clear that I am not one who believes that the past is always better. It's obviously not.

As a simple case in point, over the last week I have been to two displays of HSC major works at my daughters' school, one on visual arts, the second on design and technology. The overall standard would, I think, have amazed someone from 1961.

Yet while the past is not always better, we can use comparisons from the past to challenge current positions, to pose questions about the way our society and system operates.

Take, as an example, the continuing dialogue between Neil and myself on issues like multiculturalism (most recently here 1, here 2, here 3).

If you look at our respective writings, you will see that we are in agreement on the core issue, the need for an Australia that recognises and accepts difference. Where we often part company is in the interpretation of matters, of ideas, surrounding that core point.

Multiculturalism itself is an example.

Neil considers, he will correct me if I am wrong, that the official interpretation of multiculturalism that was dominant for a period was right and proper and blames the Howard Government in part for its decline. By contrast, I have argued that that imposed official interpretation was pernicious and divisive, working against the very thing that it was trying to achieve.

So far we are clearly on opposite sides of the culture wars. This apparently continues in our interpretation of past and current events.

Neil has a strong focus on the need to redress the wrongs of the past and mourns the way in which, as he sees it, certain things are being torn down that were in fact the recently dominant Australian orthodoxy. By contrast, while accepting that there were past wrongs, I have a strong focus on the rights of the past, mourning in turn the way that the imposition of the idea sets of which multiculturalism is part destroyed things that I considered to be valuable.

All this would would appear to place us on opposite sides of the history wars, a sub-set of the culture wars. And that might be the end of the story if our respective blogs were no more than streams of opposing opinions, each reaching out to those who agreed with us. In practice, the fact that the conversation between us is a genuine dialogue changes the equation.

In his multicultural series that I referred to earlier, Neil put forward certain views quoting an official source in part support. I challenged the historical accuracy of the views put forward in that source. Neil investigated and found that I was, at least in part right.

Now this is intellectual honesty of a high order. I found the points that Neil made intensely interesting, generating a stream of ideas that I will write about in due course. Neither of us have shifted our core positions, but we have opened up new areas for discussion and potential agreement.

I must say I do wonder sometimes how readers take the dialogue, including the sometimes very long stuff that I write as I try to explore issues and my own views. All writers, bloggers included, like to be read and my stuff is very often far from reader friendly. In fact, it breaches pretty much every rule for on-line writing.

That said, I find the whole process - both the writing and the reading including all the other blogs that I read - very satisfying.

I grew up in a world of constant intellectual debate, of interest in ideas. To some degree at least, and this is a point I have made before, blogging has recreated that world.

In the relatively short period since I started blogging, I have written far more across the range of my interests than in the previous twenty years combined. Challenged as I have been, I have been forced to constantly extend and to refine my ideas. In doing so, I have built up a body of new writing that itself provides a source of continuing stimulation.

The effects have been quite pervasive. My newspaper reading has expanded as I look for stories, ideas for my own writing. I find myself thinking about issues, responses while having my morning shower. It has begun to re-energise my professional life, an area where I had gone very stale. The burble of ideas is back.

The nearest past equivalent that I can see is my first period as an undergraduate at the University of New England, if without the sound!

There is the same sitting in the Union chatting (visiting blogs to see what is happening, responding). There is the same need to prepare seminar papers and essays (the posts). There is the same external critique and contribution (counter posts, comments). There is the same requirement to listen to (in this case read) papers prepared by others. Then there are the obligatory visits to the library (the internet) to collect material and the same temptations to pursue by-ways, to just browse! Finally, there are the international students bringing new perspectives to issues.

I have said before that blogging can be a liberal education. But it's more than that. At its best, it is in fact an external University in its own right capable of delivering an education on almost any subject area you care to name.

Postscript

I have been asked whether I would be happy for a piece that I wrote on one of my blogs to be included in a new book on work life balance. I was happy to agree. So in terms of the University of Blogging, it appears that one of the students has achieved that traditional academic dream of having a piece of work accepted for publication!

Quid custodit ipsos custodes? - Who will protect us from our protectors - and ourselves?

Before anybody comments, I know that the literal meaning of the Latin is a little different, but the message is similar.

A number of things happened over the last week or so.

One was the evolving mess of the Haneef case. At best, the Government has displayed a lack of sensitivity and compassion in the matter. This comment holds even if Dr Haneef were to be found guilty of some offence. At worst, we appear to be dealing with a miscarriage of justice.

The second was a sudden demand by a contracting company that a person they had been using for some time provide an Australian passport or birth certificate to prove that they were Australian. This move links to attempts by the Federal Government to tighten up on illegal immigration by placing severe legal penalties on companies found to be employing illegals. The person in question, a professional known by a number of people in the contracting company, refused point blank.

The third was a demand by a major Australian company in the finance sector that someone coming in to do a short term strategic assignment undergo a police check. Turns out that this is now a company standard for all staff (a very large number Australia wide) from insurance sales people to receptionists to drivers to short term contract staff. The reasons are a little obscure, at least to me, but appear to relate to the company's desire to avoid legal problems.

The fourth was the demand by the Commissioner of Police in NSW for compulsory DNA testing of suspects to create a DNA data base. In response to a query about civil liberties, the Commissioner responded "what about the civil liberties of victims?"

How do all these things link? They are part of a continuing trend that, should it continue, will choke the life out of Australian society.

A little while ago I was at a meeting to discuss what is called common access policy in social housing. This is a simple, apparently clear cut idea, that there should be a common data base and allocation approach across various categories of social housing.

A major social policy lobby group, previously a strong supporter of the concept, said that they now had strong reservations because of the way that the Federal Government had used data mining and matching across data bases to capture data about benefit recipients. In essence, Government could not be trusted not to misuse data.

I raised the question of the criminal checks with some younger Government colleagues. They could see nothing wrong with a public company demanding criminal checks on all prospective employees. Yet once a company has that information, it has then to decide what to do about it. The simplest response is to exclude anyone who has any form of criminal record for whatever reason.

At the last NSW State elections, the only piece of official information published about candidates was a statutory declaration that they were not paedophiles. I am sure that any candidate who was would have happily signed the declaration anyway. Then we have the obsession with the internet and child abuse, an area where available research suggests that current political and popular obsessions are not well supported by the evidence. By the way, the official data on child sex crimes shows a long term continuing decline.

Want to apply for a job in the NSW Public Service? Then be prepared to provide answers to compulsory selection criteria on Equal Employment Opportunity (EOO), Ethical Practice, Ethnic Affairs Priorities Statements and Occupational Health and Safety. These are all important issues, but applied in a blanket fashion to apparently all positions they become meaningless, just another hurdle to go through.

At present, if we have a problem, we create a law. We then need policies, procedures and protocols to guide practical application, to avoid the legal risks created by the law.

All this has to be paid for in cash and in restrictions on individual freedoms. The new security procedures at my daughters' school protect the school. But they make the school a less welcoming place, do not affect in any meaningful way the statistical chance of my daughters being hurt or damaged and add to my costs.

In 1961 the Companies Act was quite a short document. Current corporations law is more than twenty times as long. The costs of compliance have gone up, I am only guessing, perhaps 100 times. Yet there is no evidence that I am aware of to show any improvement in the incidence of either company collapse or corporate crime. If anything, the opposite would appear to be the case. So we are paying a lot more money for no result.

Tuesday I drove past Long Bay Jail here in Sydney. I was astonished at the scale of new building. It's huge. But then, according to ABS, Australian prisoner numbers are up 42 per cent in the last ten years. Of total prisoner numbers, our indigenous population contributes 24 per cent.

All this has been done with public support. But it has to be paid for. Here I know of no evidence that it has in any way affected the incidence of crime.

The established incidence of illegal detention in Australia's immigration system is, to my mind. quite astonishing. Go back even twenty years and it would have been a national scandal that would have brought the Government down. Even one citizen illegally detained would have been a scandal. Today it is a scandal, but in a much more muted way.

I may sound like a bleeding heart liberal when I say all this. In some ways I am. But the test I apply is a simple one. Can I see any gain to justify the cost, the complexity and the loss of individual freedom? In too many cases I cannot.

In musing about all this, I found myself asking a simple question.

What would happen if tomorrow we declared null and void every law passed in Australia since 1961? There are clear problems. For example, what would we do with the million or so people whose jobs depend on those laws? Then, too, there are changes that we might want to retain. Even so, I suspect that we would be better off.

Postscript

Still on Latin, this quotation from Tacitus nicely summarises a core message in this post: Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.

Or to put it in English: When the republic is at its most corrupt, the laws are most numerous.

Food Prices in Australia

Note to readers: This post was written some time ago and in a particular context. However, I have noticed that it is still drawing hits. For those interested, try the Grocerychoice site. This does not provide detailed item information, but does provide broad indicative data for food prices across Australia.

Earlier this month I put up a post suggesting that this had so far been a very good election campaign measured by content. Then both sides seemed to go the dogs so far as I was concerned.

In the case of Labor it was the announcement of an inquiry into food prices, something that everybody knows will have no meaningful impact. Now I have no objection to the collection of data. But in policy terms it's really a stunt.

Then listening to some of the responses I decided that while it was a stunt, it might not be a bad idea after all if only to educate people. Too many middle class Australians fail to realise that for many Australian families today, the rise in food prices is a very real issue.

Let me start with a basic statistical fact that I heard quoted tonight. It is, I think, statistically correct that as measured by ABS numbers, average incomes have risen faster than food prices. But this is misleading at a number of levels.

To begin with, the comparison should be expressed in terms of after tax incomes, money in the pocket as compared to changes in food prices. Then you have to take into account the way in which incomes have risen faster for some than for others. Then, too, you need to consider shifts in other household costs, especially rents and petrol where costs have recently risen very sharply.

All this means that the amount of money hundreds of thousands of Australian families have to spend on food is no more, in many cases is less, than it was two years ago. So shifts in food prices hurt.

Now look at price patterns.

Start with a litre of milk. At present, this appears to range in price in Sydney from around $1.21 for a cardboard carton of supermarket brand to $2.40+ for a plastic branded bottle, say Pura, at a servo.

This example says no more than something we all know, that prices for the same good vary from location to location. Anybody in Sydney knows that supermarket prices at Bondi Junction are higher than they are at, say, Eastlakes where I shop. The gap is even bigger if you move outside the chains.

Now if you have a car and can afford petrol, then you can afford to shop around. Not everybody is so lucky. Many actually have to buy at nearby locations even though prices are higher than average.

Now add to this some actual price movements.

The drought led to higher grain prices. In turn, this means that chicken prices (generally the lowest price meat) have risen by about a third over the last fifteen months. Lamb, on average the most expensive meat, has also risen sharply. Whereas the price of a leg on special used to be as low as $4.99 a kilo, it's now around $9. A beef roast that was once $9-$10 for a piece of meat is now $14.

Vegetable prices have shifted too, and sharply recently because of the cold weather. Beans that used to be regularly on special for less than $3 per kilo are now unobtainable. Zucchini is still there, but its per kilo price has shifted from just under $3 per kilo to over $9.

Few poorer Australians can afford lamb cutlets, once a standard dish for all, at $2 per cutlet. In our case, two cutlets each (not a lot) works out at $16 for the family. For many people, this is a lot more than the average amount they have for the total meal.

It is still possible to provide a major meal for four people for $12-$14, but it is becoming harder.

To many Australians this is less than they would spend on an entree, and they find it hard to imagine actually spending only this much on a major meal. Yet the reality is that there are an increasing number of Australians who have no choice but to live at at or close to something approaching a subsistence level.

This is the group that notices even a small price shift, say $2 per chook, because it makes it harder for them to afford it. When you are budgeting this tightly, small shifts become important because they mean that you will have to give up, say, a loaf of bread to compensate.

Poorer Australians have always known this problem. Today they have been joined by an increasing group of middle Australians, especially the growing number on contract work, who suddenly face a major income drop when they still have to try to service rents, school fees and credit card debts created in better times. This is the group that our welfare agencies are seeing for the first time.

Let me try to illustrate with a few numbers.

Assume, say, that you are paying rent or home loan repayments of $480 per week. This is not an unusual position in Sydney. Add to this school fees (say $470 per week rising at twice the rate of inflation), $300-$400 for ordinary living costs. Already you need an after tax income of $1,350 per week before clothes, credit car payments, insurances etc.

Now assume that family income stops. Suddenly your financial position is deteriorating by around $1,500 per week, $15,000 after just ten weeks.

I have taken a middle class example. You can run very similar numbers for areas such as Western Sydney where high mortgage payments and declining house prices have put many families into a financial vice.

The examples I have given raise all sorts of issues.

There is, for example, the dynamics raised by contact work itself, dynamics that are forcing all sorts of changes onto firms and individuals. As a simple example, firms are now paying much more for staff than they used to because they are now paying agency fees of up to 40 per cent on top of payments to individuals.

At this point, I would simply make the point that the growing concern about food prices reflects real problems facing an increasing number of Australians.

Postscript 25 July: the hollowing out of the middle class

Who would have expected that the issues that I raised in this post would have dominated the airwaves the following day (today)?

Part of the trigger here was release of the latest Consumer Price Index figures that show a major CPI increase caused by just the things that I was talking about, higher food, transport and accommodation prices. Part was the release of new data showing the continuing crisis in housing affordability. In turn, this led to commentary about the big increase in previously middle class families seeking food relief.

All this deserves a lot more than I can say here. I will come back to the topic when I have absorbed the latest data.

Buxom Wenches

I was going to run one of Norman Lindsay's nudes to illustrate this story. But then I was side-tracked by this painting. You see, I have always liked Lindsay's use of colour. I saw a lot of his work, too, because the Armidale Teacher's College was just one block up the road.

Sometimes when I look at Lexcen's blog I swear. Sometimes I just shut my eyes and proceed. Then, sometimes, I agree with him strongly.

Women were not born to be thin, emaciated, stick figures.

While I like women of all types, shapes and sizes, a lot of the women I have found to be sexiest are, not to put to fine a point on it, plumb. Now I am not suggesting that girls like my eldest who is slim are not sexy, in her case the evidence clearly points to the opposite conclusion. Just that a women who combines a bit of body with a personality is really great.

So, girls, stop worrying. Let us mere males take you as you are!

A Message for Marcel

Tom Robert's Mosman's Bay, the painting at the centre of the Hinton Bequest case.

Marcel, I have begun putting up the story of the Hinton case. You will find it here. It will take me some time to write properly.

I got depressed as I went through the material.

My father used to joke that anything that had his name attached to it was bound to vanish. And indeed there was some truth in this. The block named after him at the University of New England burnt down, the part of the University Union bearing his name was demolished.

No one can halt the course of history. Yet it can be hard when you see past dreams tarnished by the brush of time.

When the Armidale Teacher's College was established in 1928 as the first non-metro tertiary institution, it was not just a 'a country college for country kids', it was the first building block in what was seen as the infrastructure required to support self-government for New England. This comes through clearly in David Drummond's emphasis that the College must be seen not as an Armidale institution, but as one for all the people of the North.

The progressive donation by Howard Hinton to the College from 1929 of 1100 paintings and 700 art books created a collection that matched those in many capital city galleries and is today worth over a $100 million. Probably a fair bit more than that.

Unlike galleries where you visit, these paintings were hung on the College walls and were part of the daily life of students, many of whom had never seen a work of art.

Hinton was determined that his collection would not be broken up. He tied it up in such a way that when the vagaries of changing Commonwealth Government policy made the College a College of Advanced Education and then forced its merger with the University of New England, a merger that I opposed to the point of orchestrating opposition that blocked it for a period, control of the collection passed to the Armidale City Council.

By the time the New England Regional Art Museum was created in 1983 to hold the Hinton collection as well as the smaller Armidale City collection, the original dream was already badly faded.

Those creating NERAM did not promote the new venture as a gallery for all of the North, but as a Tablelands, venture. I thought then as I do now that this was a fundamental error, because it meant that NERAM was seen as essentially an Armidale thing.

This remains true, leaving the Armidale Council to try to support what is in fact a major national collection, including as it does now not only the Hinton and Armidale City collections, but also the Chaney Coventry collection.

Chaney was a New England grazier who fell in love with art and was to establish a major Sydney private gallery. I remember going to a showing in his Sydney motel room in 1967 where he had on display some of his latest purchases.

In the late 1970s after having given some works of art to Armidale, Coventry offered his collection on the understanding that an art museum would be built to house both his and Hinton's collections. Through a huge community effort and with assistance from government funding NERAM was opened in 1983.

The Chandler Coventry Collection was described by James Mollison, the former Director of the Australian National Gallery, as one of the most important private collections of contemporary Australian Art.

The collection currently has over 400 works of art and strongly reflects recent art movements.

The focus is on expressionist and abstractionist painters with some figurative artists and includes paintings by Ralph Balson, Peter Booth, Gunter Christmann, Janet Dawson, Elaine Haxton, Leah MacKinnon, Michael Taylor, Dick Watkins and Brett Whiteley.

So NERAM is home to two very different art collections, both of national significance. In addition, the museum also has the museum of printing dedicated to the printing industry and based on the Wimble collection.

Now the very existence of NERAM and these collections are under threat, a threat made worse by a botched attempt to sell a half share in Tom Robert's Mosman's Bay to the NSW Art Gallery, an attempt that has thrown a legal cloud over the Hinton collection itself.

Postscript

I have still (28 July) not made any progress on the Hinton story. In the meantime, Marcel's comments have been helpful in clarifying my views.

As I said in a response, I do admire the clarity of English that some lawyers/barristers like Marcel can bring to bear upon a problem. I stand in awe.

International Association of Saber Rattlers

I am indebted to David Anderson for this one.

Never let it be said that eccentricity is limited to the English, although they have at times made it an art form. What would you think of an international association whose members specialise in removing the top of full champagne or prosseco bottles with swords?

If I have caught your curiosity, you can find out more from David's post on his view Italy blog. I think its worth a read!

Census Tragics

I very much fear that I am what a colleague called census tragics. You know, people who get sucked into trawling through census data looking for interesting information.

In my case the disease began early. I found the Australian year books and spent many a happy hour chasing obscure facts. Then it got worse because I found the international year books. Perhaps there was something that I could have taken at the time.`

Now, with blogging, I have entered the terminal stage of the illness, the desire to inflict my discoveries on others, to share with you all those absolutely fascinating pieces of information I have found. You can identify those in this stage from the glazed eyes of those around them.

The real tragic, and I have entered this stage, is the fascination that arises when you start finding apparent errors in the data. Why is it, I wonder, that there appear to be more speakers of one Aboriginal language in a statistical unit near Blacktown (a Sydney suburb) than in the whole country combined including that unit?

My family has worked out how to cope. Say yes dear or yes dad and proceed with what you are doing regardless. Its much harder for those who feel bound to be polite!

Ah well. There are just a few more things I need to check this morning. So back to it.

Bigotry and Australia's Cultural Gatekeepers

Photo: Your turn to shout. Nino Culotta (Walter Chiari) gets a lesson in the language of drinking from a friendly Australian (Jack Allen). Scene from the Australian Film They're a Weird Mob (1966).

In an earlier post I spoke in part about the continuity of Australian humour. The first example I chose to illustrate the point was John O'Grady's They're a Weird Mob, the story of Nino Culotta, an Italian journalist sent to Australia to write a story who ends up staying.

Earlier this week a new archive on Australian film went on line. So popular was it that it crashed almost at once, as people including me tried to access it. Finally I got through, going straight to They're a Weird Mob since I thought that I might be able to use the material to write a follow up story. And so I can, but not in the way that I had intended.

I have complained on this blog about the way in which our past has been distorted to fit into popular stereotypes. Please review the following, and tell me if I am wrong.

The curator for this film was Paul Byrnes. At the end of his description of the film appears the following:

The film was an enormous hit at the Australian box office, grossing $2 million, on a budget of $600,000. It was one of the first feature films to deal openly with questions of prejudice against ‘New Australians’, albeit in a way that also flattered an Anglo audience. Nino encounters more kindness than prejudice, and quickly adopts ‘Australian ways’, becoming a model migrant. The film was in tune with the ‘assimilationist’ view then dominating Australian immigration policy

Now all this may appear perfectly okay, but consider the following.

The opening point is that it is the first feature film to deal openly with questions of prejudice against "New Australians". Note that "New Australians" is in brackets. Note that the film flatters an "Anglo" audience. Nino quickly adopts "Australian Ways", again the italics, becoming a model migrant. Note, too, that the film was in tune with the "assimilationist" view, more italics, then dominating Australian immigration policy.

Now look at the clips illustrating the film. Two out of three deal with prejudice. The title's chosen for these clips are "Why don't you go back to your own country" and "a dago just the same". So what does all this tell you about the film, about Australia?

Now look at the real context.

The book itself was published in 1957 as a story by Nino Culotta. At that stage the mass migration program was less than ten years old. As I outlined in my Migration Matters series, this was a unique program in the post war period since it is the only case where a country chose to admit migrants at a scale huge enough to ultimately change the very nature of society. This was done with remarkably little prejudice or social distress.

The book was a huge success when it came out. In relative terms, it probably sold as many copies as a new Harry Potter release today. This is can be seen also in the success of the much later film. At one level the book was a good yarn, but it was also something of a parody, presenting Australians to themselves in exaggerated form. That was part of the reason for its success. My mother, for example, roared with laughter.

The book did record prejudice, but with humour. When Nino meets the man who would become his father in law for the first time, an Irish Catholic, he responds to the prejudice by pointing to a picture of the Pope on the wall, asking why he has a picture of an Italian there.

In its picture of prejudice, the book brings out a key distinguishing feature of Australians, our capacity to distinguish between individuals and any prejudice we may have about the group that that individual comes from. This feature is a key part of the reason why migration worked.

The book's sequel followed Nino and his Australian friends back to Italy, tracing out further the nature of cultural differences.

As for the assimilationist tag, I can only say this.

Assimilation simply meant fitting in. We did not expect migrants to give up their language, to change their religion, to change what they ate, to pass citizenship tests. We expected them to be proud of their past. I could wish that we still had this policy in place.

Personal Meanderings

This photo of the Paddle Steamer Jandra on the Darling River near Bourke is from Gordon Smith's magnificent continuing series on his outback trip. Note that there is actually water!

I had intended to call this post personal reflections, but meanderings is more like it.

School started today. So back to the usual round. I was going to say that I have only to survive a little while longer, but in fact I will miss it!

The high standard of posts continues on some of the other blogs I read. I will try to do a proper report here at the weekend pointing to some of the posts. At this point I will only note that they keep me in touch while providing a liberal education, using liberal in the old fashioned sense of the word.

A colleague at work is doing a university course on the Aborigines and the nation state. She asked for my help because she knew that I had been blogging on the Aborigines. I was happy to help. However, I had to warn her that without a close look at the course outline this could be very dangerous since she might well fail!

I have continued digging through the census data. There is some interesting stuff here that I want to write up in due course.

Another conversation at work where a different colleague was worried about antibiotics in milk since she thought that they had to use drugs to make cows produce milk all the time! Mmmm.

Ah well, I have to cook tea.