Diatribes from a Strange Land

Yup, it’s here again, yet another half hour wasted resetting all the clocks, video recorders, cookers, phones (eek - just thought of one I’ve missed). Even my Windoze W2K server which failed to change for some reason. That’s time I’ll never get back. I’ve the fight with the Holden’s ruddy clock yet to come. Next week I move my working day back half an hour, I can’t move it an hour it’s set by an external factor, but I can save at least half an hour by staying at work. There’s no point in going home in the heat of the day, I might as well stay at work and used shared air-con as go home and use one just for me. And it’s an extra hour when it’s too hot to go out and work in the garden and by the time it cools down it will be a hour more into the evening meal/slump in front of  the telly period.

But the real killer must be the amount it must cost the state. It it took me half an hour at home, how many man hours are lost at work resetting clocks. Not to mention the email we had at work last week. I’d never thought how it might affect a hospital - apart from servers being shut down and restarted to make changes and the danger of logs getting over-written. But of course, where patients’ treatments or measurements are being timed and recorded / logged, what happens when those logs have recorded times that show apparent no action for an hour. Well there are a complicated set of rules to deal with it.

And what use is all this? so that people who want to send their days dealing with the eastern (and more southerly) population centres, where the day-length alters more, don’t have an extra hour’s gap. Well if you like it so much over there - move over there. This is WA. Leave it alone. Or get up an hour earlier you idle git!

Next year of course is the referenda on whether the enforced three year trial should be made permanent. I’m sure that will be another waste of people’s time and money, we’ve had referenda before and the government just ignore them. Don’t tell the Americans, last country they thought wasn’t living in a democracy, they bombed back to the stone age.

It’s been mention before in this blog that many small country towns in W.A. are dying a slow death. Driving through most towns shows a predominance of old, dilapidated homes. This is in stark contrast to the metropolitan area where even the old houses have a cared-for, renovated look. Having been here for six months I’m beginning to see why - there is a massive lack of trades people.
Western Australia is very heavily regulated with regards to trades which removes the D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) culture that exists in the U.K. Even changing a electrical outlet socket requires a licensed electrician, if the socket is to be upgraded from a single socket to a multi-outlet one than a higher grade, electrical contractors license is required to be held. All changes must be documented and certificates issued. Even painters are licensed. Any work that would cost more than $20K in total requires a insurance which effectively means being a registered builder.
The effect of this is that to get the smallest job done on or around a house involves a search for an appropriately licensed tradesman and then a wait for him to be available. Of course, if is just a small job then you’ll wait at the back of the queue whilst any available bigger jobs are done first. The situation is bad enough to bring to mind the old Russian, Soviet era joke: A comrade walks into a car show room and says he wishes to purchase a new Trabant. The salesman takes down his details and rings the factory to get the delivery date. Putting down the phone he says “Comrade, your new car, it will be a blue one and shall be delivered on October the 10th, in three years time”. The purchases pulls out his diary and says with a look of dismay, “Oh no, I’ve got the plumber coming that day.”
So what are the causes of this shortage of qualified trades people? One will be the draw of the metropolitan area. Living out here does take a degree of adaptation. We’ve decided to move to the slow lane and settle out here but many would be more likely to want the bright lights and facilities of the metro such as cinemas and big shops. However a major cause must be the resources boom. The mining companies pay massive wages for fly-in, fly-out workers and being salaried is always much easier than self-employment. Mining may be bringing in a fortune in tax revenue and pushing up house prices but it is ripping the guts out of the country, literally and metaphorically.

Like much of the “developed” world, health care in Australia is in a mess. The level of care you receive depends not only upon where you are but also on the depth of your pockets. What is more alarming is that an inverse relationship may exist between the depth of your pockets and the appropriateness of your treatment.
Australia does have an excellent public healthcare system that is available to everybody and provides world class treatment and care. The system is of course limited by a budget set by the government(s). Australia does also have a private health care system and number of components are private.  Although complicated by government low-income support systems the basic health care model in Australia is that there is a Government funded public system, once you earn above a certain amount you have to pay an extra fee in taxes each year as an extra contribution, unless this is replaced by a greater payment into a private health care system.
It may come as a surprise to British readers but here the ambulance service is privately funded and draws those funds from a number of sources and although an ambulance will be available to all, the cost depends on how you paid for it. The basic model is that everybody should join the St. John Ambulance every year for a very modest fee and this covers their ambulance fees. Once you buy into private health care then this is covered. Except it is and it isn’t. Most health care policies cover the first recovery from scene to first point of treatment, normally your local hospital. After that ambulance fees are passed to the patient. If you live in a country town and get shipped to a local hospital for emergency treatment and then on to a regional or metropolitan hospital for further treatment, expect a hefty bill. Unless you also bought the St John Ambulance membership, in which case what exactly is your private health care company doing except making a profit?
Of course, Australia is so vast and so sparsely populated that there is also the excellent Royal Flying Doctor Service which relies on public funding and a pittance from the federal government. But that is another can of worms we’ll leave for another day and another blog, I mention it only for the sake of completeness.
However the real problem with dual private / public healthcare systems is the level of appropriate healthcare that the patient receives. Private medicine exists to provide a source of income for the companies and their shareholders. Private medical insurance exists to make a profit for those companies and their shareholders. Now I’m not saying that the Doctors and medical staff aren’t working at the best of their abilities to give the best available care to their patients or that their decisions are guided entirely by monetary issues. According to Peter Aldhous in this week’s New Scientist magazine “In the land of the free market, novel medical devices and drugs are adopted with an enthusiasm unmatched by anywhere else in the world”. Helen Darling, President of National Business Group on Health in Washington DC states “There is excessive use of just about everything’ and “It just gets worse and worse”. At the current rate of spending increase the US Congressional Budget Office reckons that US health spend will balloon from 16% of GDP in 2007 to 49% in 2082 - a situation that is clearly unsupportable on current economic principles. The cost of US healthcare has tripled in the period 1990 to 2006.
The reason is obvious. In a privately funded system, the paying patient expects the latest and greatest drug, equipment or procedure from their doctor. Because their insurance company is paying cost ceases to be a defining issue. The grossly over-weight, sedentary, middle-aged man who goes to his doctor complaining of an inability to drink red wine any more without feeling ill for days after and general malaise is given regular liver-function blood tests and one course of pill or another. A note is placed in their file that they’ll be a fine candidate for a liver transplant in a few years or so. ‘Cherrrr-ching’ and away they go. A more appropriate ‘treatment’ may have been a few unkind words like ‘lose 50% of your blubber you fat….”. I doubt many doctors would be so unpleasant or so rude but published, peer reviewed research show that livers, rather than needing replacement, can recover from as little as 10% of remaining functioning mass IF and it’s a big IF, the root causes of the damage are removed. As this is normally Fatty Liver Disease damage and excessive drug consumption (alcohol, pharmaceuticals and pollutants) it’s a big ask. Especially as society (the advertising industry?) portrays eating a healthy, organic diet as a bit out-there. As anyone who has ever tried any sort of diet knows, shopping and trying to reduce salt, fat and additive intakes seem to be mutually incompatible.
So where do we go from here, well Barrack Obama has recently said “Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible healthcare for every American. If you have healthcare, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don’t, you’ll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves. And as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and dying and need care the most.” Let’s hope he gets to act upon his words and that Australia will follow Americas’ lead, as it normally does. However the real issue will be changing the economic system that has driven us to this point. That might not happen unless the world, or at least the US of A, goes through the impending economic collapse that bankers and governments are fighting so hard to prevent. It might not turn out to be a bad thing.

Seemingly within hours of scraping together enough votes and support from other parties to form a government, the new Premier of Western Australia announced his intention to remove the moratorium on uranium mining within the state. This is in the same state where the mining and thus, the transport and shipping, of lead has so polluted the town of Albany that every child tested has above permissible levels of lead in their blood. Where every tested rainwater tank is rated too polluted to drink. Remember that this was only discovered when people kept complaining about the thousands of wild birds that kept falling dead from the skies. Eventually the authorities investigated.  What was the upshot of this? Well now they ship the lead out through the Port of Fremantle, a bigger town so that presumably they can pollute even more people.

Now they want to mine and ship uranium. Apart from a track record that indicates that this can’t be done this safely, the real issue with uranium is it’s eventual use. Now I’m basically a supporter of nuclear power, at least in theory. I used to work in the industry. I think is possible is to build, operate and decommission a nuclear power station safely. There are even ways to treat and dispose of the waste in a permanently safe manner. The problem is of course, that these are theoretical possibilities. Actual practice is not set by scientists working to a consensus of peer-reviewed research publication. Power stations are operated by commercial bodies under commercial pressures and governed by government regulation that is devised by civil servants and voted upon by politicians with vested interests and for the sake of agreement - the strongest of which is probably the ‘not in my back yard’ principle.

This is why in the half century that we have had nuclear power stations, not one, not a single one has ever been completely decommissioned and no waste has been permanently disposed of. What we do have is a collection of shut down and partially dismantled reactors across the world and a growing quantity of waste waiting for a decision on what to do with it - or where to hide it next.

We’ll skip the discussion of nuclear power’s bastard relative - nuclear weaponry - that’s a whole other set of nightmares to look at. The issue is: should we be starting the process - digging up the uranium in the first place. After all, the only reason to do so is for short term gain - very short term when you compare the lifespan of the revenue stream the mining will generate with the (half-) life time of the waste products.

This weeks’ local paper front-page headline calls the latest Narrogin Leisure Centre fee increase a ‘fiasco’ and quotes the town C.E.O., one Gary O’Neil, as claiming it isn’t an increase.

That the Leisure Centre has provoked controversy in the town ever since it was proposed, never mind built, isn’t in question. It was a huge expense for a small town to take on as can be evidenced by it still taking 20.6% of this years budget despite a reported major loan pay-off from surplus in previous years. How anybody, never mind a  council, could build a heated swimming pool in Australia, a country so sun-drenched that a major health hazard is sunlight induced skin cancer, where daily summer temperatures regularly get into the 40s of degrees Centigrade, where even winter temperatures pass as a pleasant summers day to anyone who grew up in the UK and then heat that pool with gas, beggers’ belief. Not solar heating or even geothermal, but gas. To add insult to this injury, Narrogin isn’t even on a gas pipeline. No, the fossil-fuel gas has to be trucked in by tanker!! Work out the carbon-footprint of that one!!

However the current item that has got the grumbles going around town is the cost of entering this palace. The council has long tried to up it’s income. A few years back I remember outrage when having reportedly asked surrounded Shires for a contribution and been rebuffed, the council decided to charge people extra to enter who didn’t have a Narrogin address. Again it is only rumour and supposition but the tale was that this move caused a drop in customers as people boycotted the place on principle.

Now it must be admitted that my current information comes solely from that reported in the local paper and gossip but apparently the Centre Manager has ‘resigned’ and Mr O’Neil is claiming that ‘centre managers had not been implementing the correct fee structure for the past two years’.  It is also reported that the aforementioned Mr O’Neil hopes that the public will consider membership to ensure a discount on entry. This ‘membership’ is apparently $250 per annum. The paper reports that council ratepayers are entitled to become free members being as a proportion of their rates (20.6% by my calculations) goes to its running and upkeep and Mr O’Neil would love to have 300-400 members on the books. Excuse me? If ratepayers are free members then they’ve already got about 5000 of us! Isn’t this just another way of imposing a tax on non-Narrogin residents again?

Me? I’m just longing for next weeks paper and seeing how much this gets retracted or “clarified’. Meanwhile someone should either give Garry a spade to dig himself out of the rapidly growing hole or get him to a dentist quickly - he’s a foot he needs extracting!

I have long been of the opinion that most “sport” is just a game. F1 racing is a sport and the technological advances provide a cost benefit for the manufacturers and safety benefits to the rest of us. Drug-taking thugs running around a footy field are just game players and providing no more than a gladiatorial spectacle. I have to wonder how today’s entertainment of this type will be viewed by future generations, with the same disgust we show for the Roman Games of two thousand years ago?

All this is an unpopular view in Australia which is as ’sport’ obsessed as a nation can be. Indeed to gain citizenship an immigrant must pass a test, some of the questions of which are sport based. It doesn’t matter if the person has paid tax reliably during their stay in the country or committed a string of minor offences, no, the essential is that they can answer a sports quiz and show they have true “Australian Values”.
Further evidence of this attitude is the recent Olympic GAMES. Each of the gold medals Australian athletes brought home has cost the tax payer $17 MILLION dollars. Contrast that amount with anything you like that would be in the public interest, say cancer research, road safety research or even food standards enforcement and you see where the Government’s and by implication the voting public’s priorities lay.

All this has a local context too. The analysis of our rates bill shows that the single biggest component is sport. By devoting 25.9% of the budget (Source: Town of Narrogin 2008/9 Budget in Summary - Sports grounds 5.2%, Leisure Centre 18.4% and Leisure Centre loan repayment 2.3%) this by far the biggest, followed by Roads and drainage at 18.4%, Governance at 12.3% and then the Regional Library at a paltry 7.7%. This doesn’t include other amounts camouflaged by such things as “Donations to community groups”. Isn’t it about time Sport and game playing became self-funding? If people want to play games then they should be able to, there are possibly even health benefits ( if only for the players not injured by that same game and certainly not for the spectators!), but surely they should do it at their own expense, not that of the community - a community that can’t even “afford” to recycle it’s own waste (see earlier blog).

It’s annual rates time in Narrogin and the council has circulated a questionnaire to help us express our opinions on the Town of Narrogin Council’s waste disposal policy. Basically they don’t have a waste disposal policy, they just drag everything to a big hole outside of town and throw it in. I’ve referred in this blog before to ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and in that tale I seem to remember a court case ensued following throwing rubbish away but in this case it’s all quite legal. Narrogin does have a poor record in the waste disposal area - see this blog from 2005.
Having moved here from Perth where two dustbins is the norm and waste recycling has been going on for some time, admittedly for a lot shorter time than in Europe, it’s a bit of a shock to move to an area where there is no recycling and all waste is just dumped. Rumour and scuttlebutt around the town says that sections of the council even discourage recycling start-ups in the area. Unbelievable? Perhaps, but we will have to see how long it takes the town to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century by impending government legislation.
What really saddens me though is that this lack of interest in waste disposal and recycling seems representative of the attitude of the great Australian public. This is a huge, empty country with countless kilometres of deserted roads. Most delving though some of the most dramatic and at the same time, barren countryside on earth. But stop at any point along a road at any distance from civilisation and walk along the verge. What you will find is an endless line of empty bottles, beer cans and plastic food wrappers. There might not be a soul for a hundred kilometres in any direction but I’d bet you’ll find some rubbish within a few metres. How sad and pathetic is that?

This is the first of my new long weekends as I now just work a 9 day fortnight. Hurrah!! Home early each day, no long days of travelling and now every other weekend is a long weekend.
I started this weekend by fetching our new toy, our very own John Deere Tractor-Mower. Oh what a toy!! Oh what a huge change it’s making. The front garden has been transformed in a few hours from a unruly, weedy paddock to a garden with an expanse of immaculate lawn!

Currently the back garden is too wet to mow, in fact in places it’s got water running across. But soon it will dry out and then it can be mowed - then it’s on to the one acre paddock - oh joy. At a risk of sounding like a yokel with straw clenched between my teeth, I can now say I spent a Friday morning underneath my tractor, spanner in hand, changing the blades. LOL.

It’s that time of year when all Australians sit down to wade through what can be the nightmare of completeing a tax return. Even if you are employed by a single employer and pay tax out of your salary the need remains. It seems that most often the ATO will pay you a sum based on your over-payment during the year. This just means they have had a tax and interest-free loan from you all year. I don’t understand why this happens as in the UK your circumstances generate you a tax code which determines how much your employer taxes you and you only ever complete a tax return if you run a business or are self-employed. However my main complaint as a ex-Windoze user is the inability to run the software under Ubuntu / LINUX.

So why is the government Tax Office tax software only compatible with a proprietary, foreign owned software and operating system - namely MS Windows and Internet Explorer?
Before you can complete a tax return on-line to the Australian Government you have to pay money to foreign nationals.
Why can’t they produce software that will run on Open Source freeware such as LINUX. This is a stance taken by much of the EU - where all government offices have to run non-proprietary, open-source software.

The relevant ATO page says:
“Information about other operating systems and browsers
* The downloadable version of e-tax may not work on operating systems or browsers other than those we have recommended.
* The on-line version of the baby bonus claim may not work on browsers other than those we have recommended.
* If you choose to use an operating system or browser that is unsupported by its vendor, you may experience problems using the e-tax software.
* e-tax is not compatible with Linux or Apple Macintosh computers. However, e-tax has been tested successfully on an Apple computer running OS X v10.4.3 with Virtual PC 7 software emulating a recommended Windows operating system.

The Tax Office is committed to providing you with easier, cheaper and more personalised service. Part of this initiative is a commitment to the continuous improvement of e-tax. The Tax Office will continue investigating to make e-tax available to different computer platforms.”

What is also worrying is that the software requires full Administrative rights to run, not via a proxy server and it requires holes punched in the firewall. Now if internet banking from major banks can run over any browser from any OS without lowering the firewall, why can’t the ATO software?
Quote:”

Secure networks

e-tax works with firewalls and uses encryption to secure your communications with the Tax Office. The firewall must be configured to allow communication between the Tax Office and your computer. If your network or your firewall does not allow this communication, you will not be able to use e-tax. For more information, go to e-tax firewall configuration details.”

So despite their statement that “The Tax Office is committed to providing you with easier, cheaper …” they are providing the arguably more difficult, certainly more expensive and a less secure option.

This evening’s television news contained an item concerning the Australian government’s high-speed back peddling over climate change initiatives. Having been elected after promises to take some action they rapidly ratified the Kyoto Treaty (which didn’t actually commit them to doing anything) and promised to take some positive action ‘in the future’. Now apparently any action taken is likely to have cost implications and make life a little more expensive for the voting public who are already moaning about the cost of the petrol they pump into their multi-litre, gas-guzzling cars.

Well wake up you spineless cowards, unless you take some really positive action right now, climate change will accelerate to a point where we can’t reverse it. Once large amounts of the crops fail and coastal property values sink faster than the oceans rise, a few extra cents on the price of a kilowatt-hour of electricity will be the least of your problems.

Australia: where voting is compulsory and the last choice was between a man who denied climate change existed and a so-called socialist party unable to spell the word Labour. Some times I wonder if mankind isn’t just too stupid to exist much longer.