Slumbering Green

Two years. That’s how long since a man I used to call my friend ghosted me. At first I was upset. I thought I had done something wrong. I examined my behaviour for months and months, always coming back to the inescapable fact that a person who used to contact me to catch up had ceased doing so. For no reason I could see. Well, not entirely. Two years ago I was full of enthusiasm for my art career. After 50 years doing other things I was finally getting back to what I had originally, in my youth, wanted to do. Make art. My friend and I went to a movie. I got a call on my phone and had to leave the theatre and it was something I couldn’t ignore. I couldn’t put this person off. It’s like that sometimes. When I had finished my call, not wanting to disturb other patrons, I left the theatre. I had to pick up some prints from my print shop not far from the cinema anyway. And the movie was dull. So it’s been two years. I don’t want you to feel sorry for someone as inconsequential as me, that’s...

A technician came around on the last day of spring to scope out the installation site, he went up a ladder to peer at the roof, went down to the basement to see where the inverter would go, and went into the light well to check out where the cabling for the electrics would be put to bring the power down from the roof to the garage. On 4 December Think Renewable called me briefly to set a day for installation, and this was organised to be done on 2 January. By the middle of the month I was optimistic the installation would go ahead due to the generally dry weather we’d been having.  To help keep a cap on my energy spend I signed up for two AGL savings events. This is where they ask you if you want to be part of their effort to keep power consumption low during a peak period. Usually this is at around 6.30pm when people are at home together using appliances. For one event I got the $5 credit to go toward reducing my next electricity bill. On 2 January the installers came with two veh...

I finally bit the bullet and commissioned a company to put in solar panels. A guy came around canvassing households and I got to talking with him. Later he got another guy to come and go through the numbers, explain the process. After that I signed a contract and the company Think Renewables called me to organise a site visit by the installer.  They’ve consulted with Ausgrid about voltage and the installer comes next week to survey the house. This is where I am in the process, and it’s not going to cost me anything at the outset. What happens is that the government pays a subsidy to the company on my behalf and then I pay a monthly fee to Think Renewables’ money handler named Plenti by putting money in my transaction account, which they debit. The guy who came around to get the sale is named Charlie and he’s a Brit. He carefully described how my quarterly electricity bill will be reduced after installing the system. He also said that it would be double the cost if I got a battery, ...

It started in Queensland with the ability of landlords to raise rents just once a year. This is bad enough because it’ll lead to bigger jumps as landlords try to anticipate the market. Why would you move if you have to pay for transport? But the Greens have been pushing for rent control for a long time. If Albanese introduces the same measure in other states, especially Sydney and Melbourne, the problem of high rents will just get worse for renters there. Then if you put a cap on rents that the government decides more and more landlords – who are already getting out of the market – will sell their properties because owning a property as an investment will become more unattractive. The upshot all this regulation will cause is fewer rental properties. It’s already a margin call owning a property as an investment, there are other ways for people to place their funds than in bricks and mortar. When Covid hit many landlords went backwards as rents tumbled. Then came inflation and high...

Albanese is getting ready to increase taxes other than those on superannuation. Super is his stalking horse, he's softening up the electorate and seeing how voters in NSW behave this month in the state poll. The NSW election is a referendum on Labor's federal Super policy. If ALP win in NSW he'll make further tax policy announcements, going back on the policies regarding capital gains tax and negative gearing that he took to last federal election. The Guardian reported in a headline that the ALP isn’t planning to change capital gains policy with regards to the family home. BUT he will change the ALP policy with regard to a second or third property etc. It’s on the cards if the Guardian is saying this because the Guardian is a staunch leftwing paper that supports more redistribution. Labor is getting ready to Venezuela the economy. Even a death tax won’t be off the table. I listened to a popular economic correspondent that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) often ...

Why wasn’t I surprised when an ex-school principal took part in a military-style exercise shooting and killing three people? Guns have always been a part of the frontier. Queensland is still a frontier state. Don’t talk to me about the driving, the unwillingness to use vehicle indicators to signal when your car is going to turn, the high-speed pursuit-like behaviour on the Bruce Highway north of Brisbane, the tendency of people living in the north of the state (a state which is the size of Alaska) to refer to people living in the southeast as “Mexicans”. Julian Assange grew up in the north, he wrote the book on distrusting the authorities, and is still languishing in prison because of his radical ideas. Queensland has a frontier problem. Nathaniel Train might’ve worked in NSW but it was a remote part of that state, and it was just a short distance across the border in Queensland where he found his apotheosis, the solution to all his problems, and of the problem of living alongside othe...

When the Chinese government said that the relationship with Australia should be “cherished” I immediately thought about Gough Whitlam’s visit to Beijing in the 70s. No media have pointed out the connection but this is not surprising as I’m quite old, older than most practicing mainstream journalists, and my referents are naturally different. I belong to a generation that is fast fading into obscurity, a kind of elder. But as the traditional welcome to country that presages most public gatherings tells us we should at least pay our respects to elders even if we don’t do what they say. China doesn’t have a functioning public sphere, although WeChat does some work in this respect, and so it needs countries like Australia to fill the gap where corruption and unhappiness reside in its extensive population. We need to remember what our predecessors have done as their example can help us to navigate the rocky passes of the present. Gough Whitlam’s momentous visit is significant because it cam...

Since QE2 passed away I’ve been watching the telecasts of the news with a kind of dread. One black suit, black tie, black dress after another seated at a desk where the conventions of royalty are pored over with the same concentration and enthusiasm as a panel of football experts discussing the relative severity of a crash tackle. Will the player be sent off? If he isn’t and he scores a try has the referee inexcusably skewed the game’s outcome?  We love the minutiae of sport just as we love being the first person in the Twitter feed to expound on the origins of the name “Hansard” or to explain why the new House Speaker pretends to go resisting to the chair at the front of the room. QE2’s sudden demise has powered our love of rules into an obsession and we wonder at the Proclamation, gape like schoolchildren at the King gritting his teeth in frustration when a tray of pens gets in his way as he’s signing some arcane document – you mean you still don’t know? – and watch enraptured as...

Scott Morrison’s premiership will be remembered for the way that this week has played out but I think that the reaction is over-the-top, and could be harmful. Leave aside questions of mental health (we’ve seen with the treatment of John Barilaro in New South Wales that Twitter doesn’t really care about “people” per se) the frightful and predictable dealing by the prime minister just shows how hidebound and fearful the Labor Party really is. If you criticise as illegal something that was just unconventional you basically short-circuit imagination in government, and if our era needs something is certainly needs politicians to think outside the box. The old “left” vs “right” paradigm that Anthony Albanese grew up worshipping is not very useful in an era when polarisation can take such extreme forms as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Trump attempt to take the Capitol by force in order to reverse the election result of 2020. We need politicians who are willing to do things that are unc...

The assassination of Shinzo Abe in Japan by a man evidently with a mental illness does raise questions on a number of fronts. It’s worthwhile looking at the tone of public conversations even in countries like Australia which doesn’t have a history of violence against elected representatives. Egging is commonplace enough not to need explanation, however, and it’s just a step up in the level of violence to get to shooting. Guns being more accessible in Australia than in Japan it’s not hard to see how this might happen, so Karen Andrews, a Coalition politician, is right in expressing concern on this account. The other problem that needs addressing is that Japan largely ignores mental health in its conversations about itself. More awareness in this regard might’ve prevented the accused from making his weapon and plotting Abe’s demise. Mental illness is unfortunately endemic in Japan and the burden on families is even larger than it is in Australia because people feel so much shame. It’s go...

A report into sexual harassment in the Western Australia mining industry highlights the corrosive nature of corporate life in a stark way. If women were being bothered by unwanted advances, if the comments coming from their male coworkers were so awkward, if they felt like they had to wear baggy clothing just to survive the workplace, where were the human resources departments?  What were HR managers doing? Did they have no idea? Were no complaints at all about fly-in-fly-out employees on mine sites registered in their books? It’s very hard to believe that some idea of the problem wasn’t talked about among HR staff. What about sharing this data with colleagues at other companies? If you have dedicated HR staff whose job it is to find out about misbehaviour in the workplace and to deal with it in a professional manner, then the system evidently failed in a catastrophic manner. A public outcry, an official government report, all of these things must lead to culture change, but I thi...

On the first day of trading after the federal election the markets went up slightly and some on Twitter were crowing but in fact share traders are only waiting to see the full constitution of the Senate and House of Reps to know which way to price stocks. The Albanese government is on probation, and it remains to be seen how much influence the Greens will have in Canberra.  If they control the balance of power expect to see market falls as traders price in the cost of new taxes and burdens on corporations imposed by the ideologically-driven Greens. While watching the news I noted Adam Bandt listing “inequality” alongside climate change as a priority for his party. I read a history of the Greens not too long ago (it was a couple of years back) and the red tinge of the watermelon party is stronger in some states than in others but it’s present everywhere. The spectre of revanchism offers people living in the community an opportunity to mobilise dark forces. We see it in some countrie...

The furore surrounding the candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, is a symptom of the problem facing conservative parties globally. As participation in political mechanisms such as parties drops, and as social media fills the void subsequently left open for exploitation, you see radical ideas being shared and weaponised for political ends. This has been apparent for some time, and what happened to the Liberal Party this election – 2022 is important for many reasons but especially for the fate of the Labor Party – is symptomatic of changes that are reshaping the way that we govern ourselves. 15 years ago Twitter was full of enthusiastic ponderings on the role of IT in politics, but now most people seem to regret how it has changed the tone of debate. Some who have benefited from the popularity of popularism dig in their heels and wear the condemnatory epithets of journalists with pride (sewer rat, for example). Others, who have felt the sting of partisanship go the other way and leav...

I was absolutely stunned to find this morning that the editors at this prestigious motoring magazine had awarded their top prize to a car that doesn’t offer a low-emissions option.  What madness. In 2022, and when take-up of electric vehicles in Australia is still vanishingly low, the idea of rewarding a manufacturing company on account of a diesel-powered automobile almost knocked my socks off. Not literally – to get my socks off my feet in any way other than the routine method would require high explosives – but at least rhetorically. Words matter, and the decisions we make every day affect the climate, whether we choose to go on holidays overseas (using tons of fuel that has to be burnt to get our conveyance through the air) or at home on a sleeper train, or whether we elect to walk down the road to do our shopping locally at the strip mall or else at a more distant shopping centre that we must use the car to get to. ‘Drive’ editors making the wrong choice just shows how tone-de...

Now that the rules around testing in some states have changed the number of cases will have to figure less in our conversations about Covid. Removing the requirement to get a pathology lab test done once a quick home test comes back positive means reporting is now different from in the past. The key indices now are hospitalisations and the number of people in intensive care wards. Even if New South Wales introduces a quick method to register a case using a mobile phone it’s inevitable that some cases won't now get reported so as the public continues to register a sense of panic by staying at home at levels not seen since the Delta outbreak the assurance it wants will remain out of reach unless we change our collective understanding of the figures. Governments need the media in order to process the messaging it has to perform in order to make sure laws and regulations are taken on-board. What they say affects what we think, and what we think changes what we do. It’s important for th...

I live in Sydney and I don’t like to brag, but on 15 December – when QR code use in NSW was scrapped – I presciently tweeted the following: I don’t think we’ll have lockdowns again but QR code and mask use probably will stay .. Today it was announced that, in New South Wales, QR code use would return. It was also announced that, in Victoria, indoor mask use might be expanded. Mask use is already mandatory in Victorian shops and on public transport there (it’s mandatory on public transport in NSW). Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that, in South Africa, where the Omicron variant of Covid-19 first appeared, infections are declining after a short, sharp spike for about a month. It looks promising. Every day Australians are watching the news avidly as the main drama is playing out in our communities at large. We know how addicted to drama people are – news stories are written to encapsulate conflict in order to draw our eyes, and the number of OTT services serving up movie...

On 8 December at 10.30am (or thereabouts, I can’t be arsed checking the numbers again) I tweeted: I'd be surprised if Berejiklian runs for federal seat of Warringah ... she'd want to avoid the controversy if the ICAC report (not expected for some time) is worse than PM Morrison suspects it might b. To prove that I’m generous with my praise at 9.20am the next day (yesterday) I posted this little sally: Brave of PM to publicly invite Gladys B as a refusal might indicate (in some ppl’s eyes) that she thinks he’s a lame duck. Shows courage of his convictions. I don’t mind, you can flame me. Feel free. Take your best shot. I think Gladys B was a brilliant premier and I know that Morrison is genuine – even though most people I know think he’s something like a snake oil salesman – because he thinks the same. It’s not every day that a politician changes an entire community. And because New South Wales immunised itself in advance of the rest of the country when Michael Rowland on the br...

Like everyone I’ve been watching the news reports about the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s investigation of former New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian. She must now be feeling like someone with a car right on her rear bumper bar – this happened to me just the other day and I pulled over to let the guy pass me and go on his way (but in Berejiklian’s case she’s the target and so won’t be able to get away). Not in the short term anyway. Longer-term she’ll emerge from this debacle prosperous in some other walk of life and in five years’ time when people report on her activities the community’ll need reminding of why she quit office. What she’ll definitely be remembered for will be her generosity. Berejiklian’s urge to help other people is what made her such a great premier but it’s what led her to indulge Daryl Maguire as well. Berejiklian identified transport as a big issue for Sydneysiders so embarked in an extensive program of spending on roads and rail. She saw that...

Controversy is the business model of News Corp and recent events have shown it to be led by individuals who are masters at keeping the heat turned up to just under boiling point. ‘Media Watch’ on 18 October concentrated entirely on News Corporation in an attempt to try to understand the latest switch – Rupert Murdoch’s reported stance with regard to the issue of climate change – which has helped the ruling Liberal-National coalition adjust its own position as well as keeping managers actively involved in the public sphere.  This is their natural element and, rather than being fazed by controversy, they welcome it because it results in more clicks on stories and therefore more advertising dollars. As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Paul Barry noted, furthermore, major advertisers like the NRMA and Coles have started to adjust their policies – and publicly air them – so it’s become incumbent on media executives to conform. As I pointed out in January, what’s more, global m...

In a way it was the ideal timing for Gladys Berejiklian to leave office: just before Freedom Day, at a time when the people of New South Wales prepare for opening up, for haircuts, for weddings, for convivial gatherings in pubs where relieved hosts are stocking up on supplies. Dominic Perrottet was right to thank the people of the state he leads. It’s been their dedication to equity and an ingrained aversion to death and suffering that has brought us to this happy place, just a few short days away from liberty. On LinkedIn I left unanswered a comment on a post a woman’d made about her time as Berejiklian’s speechwriter. Berejiklian was also in the habit of thanking people for doing the right thing. The LinkedIn comment came from an American who so deplored the lockdowns that he said our state was reviled Stateside, but when I went back to the page to find what he’d written later, days after I’d first read his words, they’d been deleted. I regretted his feelings of remorse because I wan...