Sally Pepper

The four former colleagues gathered at a suburban Italian restaurant for one of their regular "catch ups.” But were they really catching up?  They had not worked together for about fifteen years but, possibly through habit or email mailing list accident, had still kept in touch.  Only one still worked in the same clinical profession that had brought them together. 

ABC again - interest rates now.  After multiple interest rate rises from the Reserve Bank, the effects are biting into the living standards of ordinary Australians trying to pay off their housing mortgages. The banks pass on the rises very rapidly to mortgage holders who are impelled to find the extra money. There is no mercy as far as I know .  Those with bank deposits gain a little as their interest earnings increase.

An excellent, thought provoking Australian documentary called "Brazen hussies"  aired on ABC 1 on Wednesday  March 7th 2023  the night before International Women's Day.  It was released in 2020 but I had not previously seen it.  It was about Australian women's battle for social and economic equality in  the 1960s and 1970s.
 

I'm developing an unreasonable sense of proprietorship over Australia's island state,Tasmania. One could call it a "Tasmania mania", I suppose. How did this seemingly irrational neurosis arise? Am I alone?

About 15 years ago I realised that Victoria, where I live, was doomed to never-ending development, due to government insistence that we have incessant population growth, heavily supplemented from overseas immigration. You would wonder how an ordinary citizen could actually notice that the population was growing. Surely the changes would be happening in places where the people have not yet settled and would be out of sight and out of mind? To an extent, this was true for a while, and you had to go to the outskirts of Melbourne to see the sea of new rooftops on the side of highways trying to hide behind high walls. Those living in the "growth corridors" would complain of the massive changes in their local areas. They would moan in agony at the farmland and treasured bush land they could see being sacrificed for yet more suburbs. They tried to make us hear about what was happening and we listened but 15 years ago our established suburbs remained intact and our lives were relatively undisturbed so we were complacent.

In more recent years, a heavy foot has trodden on the accelerator of population growth and development. There seemed to be a spark of recognition from governments that Melbourne needed to be contained in some manner. The established suburbs were told they had to take their share of the population growth load. In came the bulldozers and, at a faster and faster rate, we all noticed empty blocks in our streets, and we struggled the very next day, post demolition, to remember what had been there the day before. Some of the demolitions got publicity. The gracious Victorian or Edwardian large houses or mansions, giving way to the wrecking ball after unsuccessful but valiant struggles by locals to preserve heritage and amenity, were and continue to be soon just large cavities. All vegetation is invariably removed, except for perhaps a token tree if not in the way of the giant yet to be constructed. Noise and the disruption of continual roadworks and infrastructure upgrades are now part our lives in Melbourne's suburbs. We live with short term uncertainty but long term resignation that our home environment will continue to be heavily degraded.

I think of not only the residents who are being inconvenienced and disadvantaged, but of the suburban wildlife - especially birds who will all but disappear. Once a large garden is excavated and transformed into a basement car park, that land is no longer a home for underground insects or flowering plants or trees. Habitat, in other words, is wiped out in an instant. "Birds can go somewhere else," they say. Well they can do this if there is somewhere else to go, but that means nevertheless that they are gone from the area. You will no longer get to hear them or see them. That is a huge loss that impoverishes your soul and those of your children, possibly before you can even put it into words.

I used to derive some comfort from the actual possibility that I can always move to Tasmania. I have visited Tasmania since my childhood as my grandparents and many cousins, uncles and aunts lived there. My family had a whole summer life-style there every year and so it was in a sense a second home. As a child I appreciated its quietness and beauty. Its sense of history, Hobart having been settled earlier than Melbourne, was reflected in many of its buildings. Tasmania, in reality, is not my home though. I have never lived there and I don't own any property there. But over the last 20 years it has been in the back of my mind as a possibility, an escape-hatch, as Melbourne's population surges towards 10 million (the same population of the whole of Australia when I was in primary school.)

For these reasons I feel a sense of alarm when I hear Tasmania mentioned in the news or on television or radio programs. I feel anxious, on the alert. What are they going to do? What are they going to change? I used to delight in the fact that whenever I returned to Tasmania, even in my adult years, it was always more or less the same; low key.

Yesterday I found my Tasmanian grandfather's 100+ year old scrap book. It provides an insight into life on that island at the time, through my grandfather's youthful passion for long-distance running. There are photos, newspaper clippings, and athletes programs about the many races and carnivals of the Hobart Harrier Club. The brown pages of the album are also filled out with images of relaxed beach goers and reunions of the old competitors 40 years later.

One album does not describe a whole lifestyle, but I could not help forming the impression that life was full and that those young men a century ago had made a life for themselves which was both physically and socially rewarding. This was in a small city in a state where the entire population of was only about 180,000"

My mother grew up in Hobart of the 1920s and 1930s. At that time her parents, as did many people in Hobart, owned a beach shack on the other side of the Derwent River to the city. She told me that she and her friends would catch a ferry to O'Possum Bay to stay on weekends. On arrival they would drop their bags at the house and proceed to the beach. If they saw anyone else on their chosen beach, they would move away around a point to another beach.

In the 1950s and 60s people in Hobart still had their beach shacks. My older cousins enjoyed sports such as surfing, water skiing, and sailing. I'm sure they worked hard at their weekday jobs or at school, but what I saw, was an easy accessibility to pastimes that would to most now seem like a luxury.

One of my cousins told me a few years ago that he would never move to Melbourne, as the 'lifestyle' wouldn't suit him. I found this amusing, as it seemed to me that no-one would actually choose the lifestyle on offer in Melbourne!

I wonder if the 'lifestyle' will suit him if the population of Hobart grows as the current premier intends it to.

Having spent the in Tasmania more than half a century ago, and hearing tales of the life there yet another 50 years before that, I feel I know the place a bit. I also know Melbourne very well and have watched it change from a rather quiet city, where you could get out easily into the country on the weekend just for an afternoon and where, if you could drive to a place, you could be pretty sure of being able to park your car there. You could be spontaneous about going places. All that has gone. Now, as often as not, I will hatch a plan involving travel in or around Melbourne, and then abandon the idea because of the uncertainties of traffic and parking.

I would like to keep alive the escape-hatch dream of simply moving to Hobart when Melbourne reaches complete bursting point. My anxiety levels rise when I hear of Hobart's fast growing population or when anyone puts it on the map for any reason. I heard this morning that MONA (Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart) was to be expanded further, and I felt sad. I like MONA but to me it is not Hobart, and why does it have to be bigger? Part of its attraction is the setting and, if it expands, more of the setting will be lost.

I would prefer not hear any news coming from Hobart. I want it to be quiet and unobtrusive and to just wait for me in case I need it.

[Article by Sally Pepper.] The Communications Ombudsman, Judi Jones, said today that nearly one in two Australians have problems with their phone or internet service and that one in four issues were not resolved after four months. For small business, the situation is even worse. I can relate to this, and I bet you can too.

The electronic matrix

The other day I was talking on the phone with a friend and as usual we were in the middle of changing the world, when suddenly, in mid sentence the phone dropped out. I then spent the next two minutes trying to relocate him in a series of false starts as we were each either engaged trying to contact one another or each sitting patiently waiting for the other to ring. I know what the reader is thinking: "Why did they not use their mobile phones?" Well believe it or not, one of us does not have one and mine was nowhere near where I had been on the land line engaged n conversation.

Of course we are now entangled in a web of communication with our mobile phones such that we rarely make firm arrangements. They are always in a state of adjustment according to traffic, weather and other contingencies. "Nearly there. Just parking the car" ... "I'll get the tickets" ... "I'm in front of the cafe with an apricot beach towel," etc. So there is huge quantity of telephonic communications happening all the time all over the place, but somehow I don't think the quality and reliability is keeping pace.

Problem 1. I have both a land line and a mobile phone and I use the Internet. I used to see the land line as an alternative communication which is independent from the mobile and the Internet. However, a change was made to my land line a couple of years ago which means that it operates via the Internet modem. I am not the first person to make this observation but it means that if the electricity were cut off my land line would also be cut off. No electricity = no phone. When a technician was making the change, I asked him about this, to which he answered that in the case of electricity failure I could use my mobile phone. That is true as long as my mobile phone is charged, I know where it is, or it is day time and I can look for it.

You may ask, "Why do you need to be on the phone just because the electricity has gone off?" Well I don't necessarily, however it is an option that I always had until those changes were made and now I don't have it. In any system - and we will call this a communication system - redundancy is a safety feature. That piece of redundancy has now been taken away. I don't recall being asked.

Digital decay

Problem 2. Phone dropping out as per first paragraph.

Problem 3. This problem is encountered on the radio. I hear presenters, increasingly often having to re-start an interview because of a 'bad line'. I also hear them putting up with bad lines (almost unintelligible) and remarking that this often happens with mobiles.

Problem 4. Are we living in a post radio era and I haven't been told? I have two digital radios, one of which tells me 'no service available' for several local stations, including Radio National. The other digital radio can receive all AM and FM stations, but reception comes in waves of audibility and silence, so that I only hear a few seconds followed by a few seconds gap, then returning sound - making the program unintelligible.

Problem 5 hasn't happened yet !! It's the NBN. I've been told mine has been delayed and I'm so pleased because the new era of constant frustration, poor service, and time wasting phone calls, has been postponed. I can still enjoy my internet, hopefully for a bit more as trouble-free as it has been for the last decade.

Nowhere to hide

I have a friend who has never owned a mobile phone due to the expense and being so trackable. She has always used her partner's phone instead. We pointed out the usefulness of mobile phones in getting you found if you get lost. "But what if you don't want to be found?" she riposted.

Recently her partner purchased a new kind of phone that unlocks with his fingerprint. My friend was aghast, pointing out that he had now given his fingerprint up to the Deep State via some transient private phone company who probably make a tidy income selling such information to the police. And they paid him nothing for the privilege! She said his fingerprint pattern could be used to pin a crime on him, and she wasn't going to give them hers because she might still want to commit a crime and, who knows what they are likely to call a crime tomorrow?

The pre-mobile phone era

If you were living in Australia after the dinosaurs, but before the privatisation of Telstra, you might remember Telecom Australia. It was a no-frills, stern kind of government organisation and it owned all the telephone lines and all the telephones in Australia - even the phone booths. You had to rent the telephone hardware (to use a modern term for equipment) that you used from Telecom or you could not telephone anyone. What is more, if you disconnected your service, or it disconnected you, you had to give your telephone back to Telecom. People would hang on to Telecom phones for years, with a sense of deep rebellion against the state, then discover that they could not open a new account until they gave the old phone back. Now you might see this as somewhat Australian Soviet era from the perspective of the 21st century, but what I remember is:

The Rules

- All telephones were black. They all looked the same. Nobody's was better than anybody else's.
- You could always find the phone because it was always in the same place, attached by a cord to a socket embedded in a wall. Even demented people could find the phone. (In exceptional cases you might have one or two more sockets and phones.)
- When you hung up the phone, there was absolutely no way that the receiver would slide off. It was too deeply set.
- Phones always worked and, if they didn't, Telecom would fix them. Exceptionately, they would replace your old Telecom phone if it happened to be destroyed in a natural disaster.
- No-one ever rang you from the other side of the world at dinner time - or any other time - to try to sell you phones or anything else.
- Everyone in Australia used the same telephone service and if it didn't give you good service, you could complain to the government.
- All the phone numbers in your state fitted into one good-sized but liftable telephone directory. There was a white one for residential numbers and a yellow one for business numbers. We knew we were overpopulated when they started to issue two volumes for Melbourne and Sydney. I think this also happened only after they privatised Telecom and then Telstra. (Candobetter.net inventor,James Sinnamon, used to be the owner of Citizens Against Selling Telstra.) Soon after that you could no longer rely on your parents' Melways to find your way around either. Melbourne was transforming on a daily basis.

It was the beginning of the end. That's when the matrix started up and most of you turned into cell-phone directed robots. A few of us remain, always using cash, never using mobiles - untraceable, cogitating the revolution. We are the resistance.

What the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has said

Nearly 10 million Australians have experienced a problem with their phone or internet service, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, Judi Jones, will announce at the Comms Day Summit today (16.00 pm, 9 April 2018).

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman introduced a comprehensive survey for the first time in 2018 and surveyed almost 3000 people from across Australia’s residential consumers and small businesses.

In her speech to the conference, Jones will also note 20 per cent of residential consumers had more than one phone or internet issue over the last year, and one in four issues were not resolved after four months. For small businesses the picture is more problematic, with almost 60 per cent identifying a phone or internet issue affecting their business.

Ombudsman Judi Jones said: "Today's results show us that everyone with responsibility for planning and delivering telecommunications service has to make things better. Phone and the internet services are essential services, making a vital difference to families, within communities and to business.

"We all have to be proactive and accessible in managing the issues. We have to listen to residential consumers and small businesses, understand the impact of problems, and offer quick, supportive solutions.”

A Six Month Update complaints snapshot will be released Tue 17 April, 2018. This six month update provides key data on complaints from residential consumers and small businesses to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman for the period 1 July -31 December 2017.

About the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman is a free and independent dispute resolution and complaint handling service for residential consumers and small businesses who have an unresolved complaint about their phone or internet service. www.tio.com.au or 1800 062 058.

About the telecommunications sector

Government and the regulators set policy and regulations for the telecommunications sector. The Telecommunications industry regulators are the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) www.acma.gov.au

Communications Alliance is the peak body for Australian communications industry. The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) is Australia’s peak communications consumer organisation.

(Article by Sally Pepper.) On New Year's Day, January 1st 2018, as I surfaced around 10.00 a.m, I heard on the news that power prices and tolls on roads around Melbourne will both increase and, that this year many Victorians will experience additional economic hardship. My immediate defensive thought was, "Well I don't use tollroads and I guess I can be more frugal with my use of gas and electricity."

But on reflection, this is, in a way, beside the point. Such thinking does not ward off forever the effects of these increases. Many people rely on toll roads to get to work each day. The fact that I don't use them only puts me at a slight advantage to those who need to use them. It is not in any way to my benefit though that other people are being disadvantaged in their daily struggle to feed their families and pay the mortgage. It is also beside the point as these increases are,unfortunately, only part of a progression. Tolls will go on increasing, as will power prices. Beside this, there will be more toll roads until I won't be able to avoid them. I also will be caught in their web. I can delay the impact but I can't avoid it.

Where are we headed? Not only I will be caught but so will many others who hitherto have felt untouched by the imposed hardships on those less fortunate. There will be a cascade of those affected. The tentacles of the owners of toll roads and power companies will eventually have most of us in their grip. After all, this is all about maintaining that ratio of the 1% as opposed to the 99% . Remember the "Occupy Movement"?

Precipice complacency

Many people I know count themselves lucky, comparing themselves with those who are not as well off. They do not see themselves as affected by the rising inequality in Australia. This "glass half full" attitude is so much more socially approved of than mine, which compares my lot with both what it used to be and also what it could have been were it not for the 1%. To me "glass half full" attitude is a sort of misplaced Pollianna-ism and given what I believe from the trend I observe it is really a sort of "precipice complacency."

It seems that all will be taken from those who don't own the means to extract from the majority. Those about to lose are those who now feel secure, even somewhat wealthy: those with superannuation, who have finally paid off their houses and look forward to a carefree retirement. Neither will things get easier for their overworked adult children, in turn trying give their children the best start they can in life. They all appear unaware, unsuspecting, that things will be taken from them by the system that once gave to them. In one lifetime - theirs - the "accumulation phase" will be over and the outgoings will be larger than the income. Most of us will be financially and time stressed. Our children will be hungry for work. Or just hungry.

Our society is as a collection of frogs being slowly warmed to boiling point by a few big frogs who've got control of the frypan. We had better take the pan off them before the bubbles start to rise.

"Dear Mum and Dad, I am writing to you from what we used to call the future but for me now it is the present. I'm in fact living in 2017, yes 17 years beyond the turn of the century that we used to think of as so far ahead in time. I am living in Melbourne still, in one of the reasonably well- heeled areas in the suburb of ***** where yesterday I saw 2 beggars sitting on the footpath along the shopping strip. Now there are thousands of homeless people sleeping rough on any night of the week in Australia." Sally, who in her youth described the cities of her travels to her parents, now writes to them as ancestors, describing the Melbourne of today, a place which would be quite unfamiliar to them. It is a cold winter and she cannot afford adequate heating in her middle class home.

Dear Mum and Dad ,

I am writing to you from what we used to call the future but for me now it is the present. I'm in fact living in 2017, yes 17 years beyond the turn of the century that we used to think of as so far ahead in time. I am living in Melbourne still, in one of the reasonably well- heeled areas in the suburb of ***** where yesterday I saw 2 beggars sitting on the footpath along the shopping strip. Now there are thousands of homeless people sleeping rough on any night of the week in Australia. Melbourne is particularly bad because housing and rents are so expensive. You wouldn't believe this but the house we used to live would now fetch around $2 million!. Young people attempting to buy a home are forced into flats or "apartments " as they now called or out to the remote edge of the sprawling city. Craigieburn, the town we used to pass as we headed north to Sydney is now a suburb of Melbourne!

It's really freezing at the moment 13.5 degrees maximum today. Remember we used to have central heating and topped it up with radiators? This winter we have been told that power bills will shoot through the roof so I have tried to economise by using only one heater and wearing more clothes inside. Don’t worry, I'm not poor but I have to be careful as we don't know what surprises are in store for us in the way of bills.

Electricity and gas distribution have been privatised . We were told this would be good for the “customer” as it would force providers to be competitive and prices would fall as they competed for our custom. No such thing has happened . You would find it intensely irritating as I do to have electricity sellers coming to the front door usually just as you are preparing dinner asking you to go and find your last electricity bill as they are sure you are paying too much and will sign you up with their company at a cheaper rate. This door to door job or the job of doing it by phone seems to fall to newly arrived migrants or backpacking young overseas travelers.

The other basic necessity that has become much more expensive is water. When you were alive, water was something we did not have to worry about. We used it as we needed to. In recent years we have had water restrictions where you had to use a particular hose on your garden at particular times. You couldn’t use a sprinkler system and the only way to get the whole garden watered efficiently was to install metres of hose with tiny holes in a sort of grid all over the garden and a timer so it turned on in the middle of the night when you were asleep. To top this all off the Victorian Government ordered the installation of a desalination plant at Wonthaggi to ensure Melbourne’s ongoing water supply. I don’t think they’ve used it yet but a private company installed it and the Victorian government has to guarantee them an income from it. Gardens are all disappearing, anyway. The word “garden” is almost a dirty word! When you talk about having a garden it’s almost as though you are talking of something wasteful and unnecessary. The trend now is to demolish houses with gardens and build all over the block, even excavating huge caverns, fence to fence for car space or more house space. It will be like a honeycomb of concrete cells throughout suburbia. I don’t know how the street trees will survive this.

As you will have gathered, Melbourne is not nearly as pleasant as it was when you were alive. It's grown to 4.5 million, bursting at the seams and growing daily . That's why the price of housing has gone up so much. Overseas criminals even launder their ill-gotten gains by buying houses in Melbourne or Sydney. One of the commentators on a business TV program stated that if agents who knew were obliged to report suspicious dealings then it might adversely affect the property market!! Unbelievable given that people are having trouble servicing their mortgages and paying their rent or are homeless!

Honestly if you came back and experienced Melbourne as it is now you would be shocked.

It's so crowded now that they are building trams and trains with a minimum of seats so that more commuters, standing up will fit in! True! I couldn’t believe it when I first heard it but now everyone accepts it as normal . Today, which as I said has been very cold , something went wrong with the computer system controlling and tracking all the trains and the system came to a standstill at peak hour! Yes, people were stranded in trains and on railway stations with no idea as to when they would be able to move. They were advised to use alternative means to get home. Many of those who chose to do this used a service called Uber where you use your mobile phone to find a driver going your way and willing to take you. Guess what the Uber drives did in this emergency: they charged 4 times the price! No sense of helping out in a crisis – just exploitation! Oh well, I guess the Uber drivers also have to pay the rent! It’s a sort of jungle out there!

The other really distressing thing is that the beautiful old houses of Melbourne are being demolished so that apartments can be built to fit in more people. They are also building high rise towers in many suburbs. The councils are actually told that they have to fit in thousands more people within a given fairly short time –frame. This will mean even more traffic as though we don't already have too much. It is now so bad that I think twice before going anywhere by car for fear of being caught up. One night I attempted to cross the city to meet, M and J and I had to give up, turn around go home. I now haven’t seen them for 2 years.

You remember the South Eastern Freeway? Well that is now part of a tollway. Yes, you can't use it any more unless you pay. You have to put a device on your windscreen and intermittent gantries check you as you go past and you are charged via an account which you need to keep topped up with money. There are many of these tollways and sometimes if you make a mistake you get funneled onto them. If you don't realise or forget to pay later you are in for a hefty fine. Driving in some normal streets the speed limits have been reduced to 40kms per hour and on many roads they change the speed limit all the time between 40, 50, 60, 70 , 80 and 100 kms so you have to be constantly vigilant checking your speed. There are speed cameras all over the place and no matter how careful you are , you can get caught. It is horrifically expensive and you lose points on your driver's license. Belinda was fined over $300.00 recently driving along Warrigul Rd at 60kms per hour in what turned out to be a 40kms zone.

The other awful thing we have now is a sort of madness. We now have bollards in the city in case someone takes it into his (invariably male) head to ram pedestrians. This happened in Bourke street this year and pedestrians were killed, including babies and children.

Sounds as though I am living in a sort of Hell, doesn't it? In a way I am. I see everything being destroyed and I am on tenterhooks waiting for the next tree or old house to fall or the next road block.

The other strange thing about now is the role of the telephone in our lives. Now we all have mobile phones which are nothing like those large heavy ones you may have seen when you were alive. They are now small, flat and fit into the palm of your hand. They all include cameras so any one of us can record anything, any time, moving or still, complete with sound. Most of us now don't go anywhere without one, so we are always contactable. It has become the expectation. When we make arrangements they are much more approximate than they used to be as we can track one another and check our respective progressions towards a meeting point usually using "text messages" . There is a problem with this though because if you are meeting someone and they let you know they are running half an hour late and you have already left home. , you have still lost that half hour because of their lateness!

Anyway, that’s the world I inhabit now and I thought it was about time I let you know what it is like and that I am surviving in it . Obviously I won’t forever, so see you where you are – sooner or later. If this does not get returned to me , I’ll assume it got to you.

From your loving daughter ( living in Melbourne 2017,)
Sally xxx

It was a hot night and twelve of us approached an impressive spread of endangered sea-creatures at a large table under cover outside. It was Don's birthday party. We had met him a few months ago at the local squash courts, and we only recognised four of the other guests, also squash players. I looked around me carefully. Would we all get on and have a laugh, reach furious agreement on something important, or would my friend and I be silenced in the face of others’ opinions in our effort not to make waves? Worse, would my friend open his big mouth? Unlike the 'old days' when it was so exciting to meet new people, on this particular evening I was plagued with doubt because of the strong political divides that are appearing in Australian society.

You may be wondering why I would approach this seemingly ordinary and benign situation with what appeared to be almost dread, or you may, to the contrary, have experienced a similar dinner.

I have thought about why I was so uncharacteristically shy about talking to new people and here is my explanation.

Winners and losers

Some of you may remember the 1990s. This was when I noticed that the concept of “winners and “losers” came into the vernacular. I remember at the time, a teen-aged friend of a friend declaring with great assurance that the world was divided into “winners" and “losers" and nothing in between. I remembered thinking with unease that this was a very unattractive, inhumane ideology.

Twenty years later, this young lady seems to have been right in practice! Australia is no longer a country where we earn our respective livings by being useful to other people and to the society in exchange for a fair reward. Now everything is so polarised with some making a killing in the 'right' industries with others just getting the crumbs and struggling with unfriendly working hours in low paid pointless jobs which did not exist thirty years ago.

It did not take long into the dinner conversaton before I had a feeling that I was sitting down to dine with some of the 'winners' that the intervening years had produced and that I might not like how they had come to win.

The first disturbing declaration, quite early in the evening was from 'Travis'. His shaved head and bling-cufflinks reflecting the light from the charcoal patio-heater, Travis told all assembled that he made his pile by helping with websites to assist overseas buyers to purchase property in Australia. "How lovely” most murmured in appreciation of his entrepreneurship. He also added that he assisted business /entrepreneur migrants to get their visas to enter Australia. Once more there was a generally appreciative and admiring response from those present. I remained silent as I was overcome with the certainty that I was dining with the enemy. This person was helping people from overseas to exploit Australia and to make housing unaffordable for locals, I thought! To me this is a disservice to the community. This braggart was making himself a “winner" at the expense of all the poor “losers” especially young first home buyers.

Travis then got onto the subject of possums and how none of us would want to know what he had "done with some of them”. His cruel remark revolted me and I felt almost panic stricken! This opportunist was not only cheerfully assisting the overpopulation and densification which displaces urban possums, he was further (and illegally) punishing the hapless marsupials.

How did I end up at the same dinner table as this monster?

When social capital still punched above greed

I guess, thirty years ago, unimaginative and insensitive creatures like Travis would have found their own level in ordinary jobs on modest salaries. Today's system, however, is geared to making winners out of those for whom the money ingredient is everything.

A drink or two later, pleasant looking Bernice offered her opinion on the negligence of the current state Labor government in not building a particular controversial toll road. Yes, she declared , Melbourne would need this toll road as we will soon be a city of 7 million. There was not a hint of regret at all that Melbourne would lose in this transition even from the overgrown chaotic, under- serviced, dysfunctional metropolis of 4.5 million that it is now. My throat was now so constricted that I failed to chime in that if we keep going at the current rate of growth we will be 20 million in a few decades. Actually that wouldn’t have fazed others present as one of them was from London, an already a bloated megalopolis.

I prudently remained silent but was inwardly seething as I was thinking of all that would be lost with new road following new road road to accommodate ever increasing traffic in a vicious circle but never managing to do so.

This same woman further warmed to her topic. “I think Melbourne should be more like Dubai.” she declared. “In Dubai they just go ahead and build things! They get on with it and don’t get bogged down in red tape, do they Roger?” Roger joined his wife in commending the way things are done in Dubai and asking rhetorically why Melbourne could not be more like it.

Why did they care so much? I wondered, but I knew if I started an actual discussion, that we would come to blows.

Red tape

I am grateful for any red tape that remains in Melbourne that gives those affected some slight chance to fight back against the destruction of their surroundings, especially from multi-storey developments and other infrastructure to cater for never-ending population growth.

I checked my phone to see the time and nudged my friend under the table. “Can we go home now!” I wailed inwardly!

These people would have been OK (apart from the possum sadist) had I met them in a different era, but now, in this era of winners and losers, I actually identify more with the losers and am out of place at a dinner party where people have done well out of the prevailing system.

We said good night and left the party, emotions churning at this near perfect demonstration of the increasing and undesirable divisions of wealth in our society. It reminded me of visiting a banking friend in Indonesia years ago, when we dined with friends of the then government. At the time it was like visiting some laughably unselfconcious members of an exotic corrupt power-elite, but the same kind of corrupt values are now reaching further and further down into Australian society and it isn't amusing close-up.

Australian comedian Barry Humphries' humour identified and targeted a world of pleasant streets and gardens that is now under threat. We've stopped laughing, but is it too late?

I was raised on the humour of Australian comedian, Barry Humphries, when his main alter ego was the suburban sage simply known as "Mrs Edna Everage” and his eastern suburbs commentary issued forth in the monotonous narrow viewed but well-meaning drone of Mr. Sandy Stone. Barry’s characters described a world which was very familiar to me, although I lived in neither the now famous Moonee Ponds nor in the apparent epitome of Melbourne mediocrity, Glen Iris. The adults in my family all found the Humphries humour hilarious, despite, or maybe because of the fact that their lives were being held up to good humoured ridicule. I shared this delight and amusement with them.

Barry Humphries' targets were mediocre, commonplace and rather petty preoccupations such as lawn mowing, sandwich making, wall colour, general domestic decor and associated status symbols. It was all so familiar and we laughed our heads off all the more, delighted to be laughing at ourselves and our nearest and dearest. Or if it wasn’t us it was someone we knew. The humour rested on an assumption of self- satisfied comfort and safety, devoid of outside threat. Our laughter and Barry’s merciless assault is an indication of how quickly we forget and how short each stage of our lives really is. Barry was born in 1934, safely clear of any expectation of participation in WW2 or The Vietnam War. He emerged as an adult in the postwar comfort and optimism of the 1950s and played to an audience where young couples were settling into their suburban Shangri -la’s. "The Australian dream” of the house and garden was alive and well and not under any threat. This situation continued for a few more decades but on a downward trajectory in terms of general accessibility, that is to say, affordability.

Fast forward to the present day and what was once a source of relaxation, pleasure, security and comedy, the suburban family home, is now turning into a tragedy.

The undermining of the family home and garden in concept and reality has been under way for at least 30 years. It began with soft rumbles, the odd newspaper opinion piece advocating the end of the 1/4 acre block and the beginning of a rhetoric very negative and critical of the way we lived. People started to parrot these opinion pieces and preach knowingly at dinner parties, that we couldn’t go on living as we were as though cleverly seeing into the future. Then they would go home and continue living as they were, no doubt thinking that it was people in the future who would have to live differently, not they. The point was that they did not express any feeling of being under threat. Yet they were. They are!

The sacred, yet hilarious homes of our parents and of us are now being demolished, at a frightening rate. The honest workmanship of the Californian Bungalo and the 50s triple fronted cream brick veneers is being replaced with nondescript non- architectural multi dwelling, fence to fence arrangements , devoid of of any reference to the humanity of those who are expected to dwell within. The subject of Barry’s whole comedy career is being pulled down in front of us; a new cavernous car park excavation appearing near where I live each week. That is the reality on the ground. In the media , a past Victorian Planning Minister, Justin Madden who now works for developers was given space for a whole article about the need and desirability, nay imperative, of demolishing 60 year old houses in a ring of Melbourne suburbs about 15 kms from the CBD. There’s always a new angle in the scramble to fit ever more residents into Melbourne (which grows by about 80,000 people p.a.) Developers who can get their hands on these unsuspecting little houses on their “1/4 acre" blocks (I understand they never were as large as 1/4 acre, really) can make a killing by demolishing and redeveloping to fit in more residences.

It seems to me that people are now really getting upset by all this. They see their local neighbourhoods in a constant state of transformation. They are living perpetually in a construction zone. Trees, houses and gardens go, roadworks and construction abound and there is the constant shock of empty blocks of land either totally cleared and levelled or exposing raw bedrock 3 metres deep, previously covered with a few tonnes of earth and rocks and iced with pleasant house and garden.

But what has this to do with Barry Humphries? Well for a start, the much derided but rather enviable and almost egalitarian Melbourne suburban way of life is swirling down the plug hole and will be gone before you know it. The people of Melbourne did very little to protect it when it was first under fire and now it is probably too late. Were we asleep at the wheel? Did Barry Humphries unwittingly lull us into a child-like sense of security about our home city?

What does Barry say now when, in actual fact what is happening is that our precious gardens are being used to accommodate an ever higher population? Had we been asked 15 or 20 years ago if we minded someone building in our backyard, we would have said, “go and find you own land!” but that is what we are being forced to do now. People move out of garden-surrounded houses into units with token amounts of land and end up with only a little bit of change from the exchange. Collectively, what is happening is that others are building in our gardens!

Barry Humphries’ jokes about the scourge of thrip on the roses (or was it the tomatoes?) will be incomprehensible to future Melbournians. How can this joke be funny when the “problem” is foreign to you?

In the middle class, reasonably well- heeled Melbourne neighbourhood where I have lived for the last 25 years, I have observed when out walking what I would consider to be somewhat abnormal human behavior in the form of a seeming local autism amongst the humans in the area.

I will describe what happens which has led me to this realisation. Typically, I go out for a walk and in the distance I can see another person approaching on the same footpath. If the person is middle aged, as I am, the inevitable footpath meeting will pan out like this: As we pass one another with less than half a meter between us, I attempt to catch the eye of this passerby in order to make mutual acknowledgement.

A low energy smile, nod or greeting in my opinion would be adequate. In 98/100 cases, I am ignored.

Admittedly, I am talking about people I do not know by name and may not even know by sight, but I still find it abnormal. I would not expect or want to catch anyone’s eye and acknowledge strangers in the busy streets of the city, but in a quiet suburban street where two people are fairly obviously locals and the only people in sight, I think it is strange that they do not acknowledge one another!

Today I even took the risk of smiling at a woman about my age in sun glasses walking in the opposite direction on the footpath directly towards me so that at least I was doing my bit! She completely ignored me walking past not remotely changing her blank expression. She didn’t have a white cane or a dog with her, so I assume she was able to see.

On the same walk, a middle aged couple walked towards me side by side with the male coming straight at me on the same side of the pavement with no apparent inclination at all to give way. I was on my extreme left on the edge so I could not move any further aside. I thought it was really incumbent on him to momentarily move behind his partner as we passed one another so we could all stay on the footpath. I held my ground, keeping to the pavement right on the edge as we got closer. Eventually, at the last second, and looking a bit put out, he moved aside so I was not forced off the pavement. It was as though I was not there until my presence was undeniable!

Younger people in my neighbourhood, display similar behaviours. Here are some examples:

Teenaged school boys walk three abreast on the footpath towards me , completely ignoring me as they approach and making no attempt to make room for me on the footpath. I am forced off the footpath, onto the grass, as uncompromisingly the trio files past. Young joggers, without fail have earphones firmly in place and eyes straight ahead. I wouldn’t expect any acknowledgement, as the act of jogging seems to take all their energy and concentration. If they are over about 25 they look agonized and tortured anyway with the effort

New migrants, noticeably Chinese and Indian, who have moved into the neighbourhood, show similar avoiding behavior to those who seem well entrenched. The newcomers must have learned quickly!! (And perhaps I am a slow learner!)

Today I encountered a Chinese man with a white poodle who looked away as I passed by and 5 minutes later, again did not acknowledge me as he crossed my path close in front of me on his way to water his dog at the drinking fountain. This was in a virtually empty scene where we were the only beings in sight except for a couple of magpies (who had in fact greeted me). I might as well have been a post!

A bit later, I passed a young Chinese woman wheeling a well polished rosy toddler in a stroller. The young mother also studiously avoided any eye contact.

So this inept, constipated, rather autistic social behavior has even spread to new neighbours it seems!

How did it come about? What does it mean?

I imagine that it spreads by someone first being ignored and then repeatedly, so that the smiler or greeter eventually stops the behavior. It takes a little extra energy to greet or even acknowledge another person but the energy expended is returned to you if there is a response, however small and you do not feel depleted. But if you are ignored, the reward is absent and, in BF Skinner terms, the behaviour is “extinguished”! Someone in my area must have started this and it has spread like wildfire! It is de rigeur to ignore one another !

All this may sound as though I am terribly needy or have some awful facial deformity but neither is true. My face is unremarkable, I have family and plenty of friends, and my life does not depend on connecting with strangers in the street. But to me it is a matter of neighbourhood courtesy and good manners.

Greeting or acknowledging a stranger is a contextual thing though. You don’t do it if encounters are terribly frequent but you do if they are infrequent.

For example, if you are driving in the outback in Australia and only encounter another car about every half hour , you wave to acknowledge the other traveler, but you ignore other drivers on a busy highway. If you are in a lift going up 15 levels with one other person, you will probably say “good morning” to that other person or at least meet their eye but if the lift is full and you are going only three levels, you will probably not acknowledge anyone unless you have accidentally trodden on someone’s toe.

Going for a walk in less upwardly aspiring areas of Melbourne to the one I call mine is quite a different experience and there, I don’t seem to be invisible. In the the seaside suburbs, I have noticed that people still meet and greet in what I would call the normal way, with a smile, or “ G’day”, as they pass like ships in the morning or afternoon, acknowledging their common human-ness and maybe even their common Melbourne-ness!

I have had my car modified so that it cannot exceed 40kmh. The story that led up to my decision to cauterise my means of transport in this way is that I found I cannot afford to drive on Victorian roads unless I have some sort of protection against expensive fines for exceeding by a small margin often seemingly arbitrary speed limits.

I consider that I drive normally around the streets and roads of Melbourne with the occasional sortie into the country. I am ever vigilant about speed signs and aware of cameras lurking, ready report any inadvertent misdemeanors to the money crunching accountant authorities, who are ever- ready to extract a day’s hard earned from my coffers.

In Melbourne the speed signs change at frequent intervals from 60kmh to 50kmh , 60kmh to 40kmh, 40kmh to 60kmh again etc. A frequently encountered speed sign is 40kmh around school during school times. One always has to reflect: Is it school holidays? Is it school hours? What time is it? All in a second or two.

I normally slow down anyway while these questions go through my mind. After the highlight of the school crossing, there is never any demarcation at the end of the 40kmh zone, so I drive at 40kmh until I see the next 60kmh sign. The cars behind me bank up but if the last sign I saw was 40kmh then surely I must go at 40kmh until I am instructed otherwise?

What really decided me on the major modification to the engine of my car which was capable of maybe 140kmh was the story of a friend who had gathered a few demerit points for minor speeding infringements- for 57kmh in a 50kmh or 46kmh in a 40kmh zone. She wasn’t actually driving fast! As we all know, even if one is using cruse control, the speed can vary according to the road surface. So despite your best efforts you can momentarily go above what you intended and if you are caught by a camera in that instant you pay the price. If traffic were policed by real police who did not have quotas to fill, then their discretion might bring about a fairer result in terms of making the punishment fit the crime.

The story is that my friend thought that the number of demerit points she had accumulated still allowed her to drive. She had no notification otherwise, but was recently pulled up by the police whilst driving and told she had exceeded the demerit points limit and was driving effectively un licensed. She tells me she also has a $6,000 fine for her efforts in mainly trying to get to work where $6000 would represent about 3 weeks’ work.

I’m pleased though that now I am permanently protected from the extortion of “speeding” fines and demerit points as I just can’t physically speed any more! It is a little inconvenient as I have to set out very early now for any assignation. In fact I had better stop writing this very soon as I have an appointment four suburbs away at 3.00pm and its getting on for 10.00a.m. I think of my car now, not so much as a means of transport but as I sort of shopping cart. I could really walk to most of the places I go faster than I could drive when all the obstacles as well as the speed are taken into account but it is good to be able to throw the shopping into the boot and carry wet weather gear in the back seat.

Melbourne was not always like this. Once you could more or less drive at what you considered a safe speed, most of the time and you would be right. With major, ongoing increases in population and traffic, regulations abound. I do not expect driving in Melbourne to be fun any more, but I’m pleased I’ve found a way to survive from the legal point of view on Melbourne’s roads.

I have seen speed limit sign of 30kmh on odd occasions, but I opted for the limit on my car ..er shopping cart to be 40kmh as I am actually a bit of a risk taker underneath it all.

At first glance The Australian Greens’ announcement that they would abolish the negative gearing ₁  tax break, in a bid to increase government revenue through increased taxation and improve homelessness and housing affordability looks like the right move. I have, however a few questions about this.

Firstly it must be pointed out that the Australian Greens advocate that the new tax regime be “grandfathered” so that current negatively geared investors could continue to be so, but that no new investors would be entitled to this. Two sets of tax rules would apply side by side.

I wonder if borrowing to buy a property would be as attractive to a potential investor if s/he could not negatively gear. Presumably, The Greens do not advocate NO tax deduction on an income-generating investment but just to the point where it goes into the red.

I see from the policy document that their ruling would apply to all asset classes. At least here is some consistency.

Negative Gearing applies to non-property investments too

Negative gearing is usually only discussed in the context of property, but of course it applies to other investments too. At present one can borrow to buy shares, which will generate an income since they pay dividends. These dividends are subject to income taxation, in many cases offset by company tax already paid, in the form of imputation credits to the investor. Any shortfall in the income from the shares compared with the interest on the loan is tax deductible. With The Greens’ policy presumably this would only work up to the point that the investor is not going into the red.
One needs to look at why people borrow to invest in any asset. The sensible reason to do this is that the investor believes that the investment will rise in value, such that equity in the asset increases and the loan starts to look small by comparison. The investor can profit in two main ways:

1. With housing, as the value rises, the rent will also increase. Eventually the investor who was negatively geared could become “positively geared” and hence will pay tax to the government.

2. The investor who sees that s/he has made a paper profit can realise this gain, pay back the bank and pocket the profit minus Capital Gains Tax.

I cannot see that abolishing negative gearing will free up housing for non-investor home buyers nor that the tax gains for the government will be as significant as the Australian Greens believe. The abolishing of negative gearing would affect Australian investors, but it would not affect foreign investors who have borrowed from elsewhere. How would that be addressed?

Greens proposal fails to address land-costs – the biggest part of housing unaffordability

The Australian Greens advocate the use of prefabricated houses as a part solution to the terrible problem of homelessness in Australia. I don’t see anything in the document about the land required to put the prefab house on. Land-costs are the major component of housing in cities and these costs are more marked in areas which would be considered to be in a “good position.” The actual house is a relatively minor thing. If people had their own land, probably most would manage to erect some sort of shelter for themselves!

The Australian Greens, in deciding that “negative gearing” is to blame for Australia’s housing woes (and the complete evaporation of “the Australian dream”) fail to address the demand factor which is fundamental to the issue of unaffordable housing.

Where do the demands for Australia’s housing come from?

1. Australians as they reach adulthood tend to need housing apart from their parents . Only about half as many people die in Australia as are born here in any one year so there are roughly only half the number of houses available from that source as there are young Australian people looking for them. Thus there is a built-in shortfall because of our demography.

2. In addition to this, with high immigration, there are likely to be more migrants invited to Australia as business migrants, as skilled workers, students or for family reunion, than there are young Australians looking for their first home.

Penalised Australians would retreat and foreign investors advance

These two groups compete in the same housing market. If Australian would-be investors retreat from the housing investment market because the advantage of negative gearing is not there, I think as long as the total demand for housing does not slump then non-Australian investors will fill the gap left by locals and compete with local home-seekers. With large numbers of people needing housing and a short-fall in supply leading to very high purchase and rental prices, home-seekers and would-be renters will “fall through the cracks.”

Scott Ludlam says that 7,000 houses “for the homeless” will be supplied by 2020. That’s great, but people need housing now. There are 105,000 homeless people on any one night in Australia, according to Salvation Army figures and according to “Kids under cover”. Family breakdown is blamed for a lot of this but if housing were abundant, as it should be, a family breakdown would not result necessarily in homelessness.

Something needs to be done much more urgently about this problem, one which used to be practically unknown in Australia. We all, including The Greens, think we have a silver bullet for this problem but it seems clear that the demand side of the equation still needs to be lightened. This can be addressed easily and quickly at little or no cost. We should not be bringing in large numbers of skilled immigrants to compete against local young people for both housing and jobs. In maintaining very high immigration we are doing our young people a terrible disservice. Surely they deserve better than this?

NOTES

#fn1" id="fn1">1.#txt1"> ↑  "Negative gearing is a form of financial leverage where an investor borrows money to invest and the gross income generated by the investment is less than the cost of owning and managing the investment, including depreciation and interest charged on the loan (but excluding capital repayments)." Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_gearing

I don’t have kids but I am disturbed about the Heart Foundation’s Active Healthy Kids very poor report card for Australian children last week. It said that Australian children are largely unfit because of a lack of exercise and that this deterioration has happened in the last couple of decades. Natasha Schranz author of the Foundation's inaugural report has graded Australian children at a disgraceful D minus. Contributing to this terrble score was a D for "active transport", meaning not nearly enough walking or bicycle riding to and from school.

Prisoners of chair and screen

81 % of Australian children do not get the required 60 minutes of physical exercise per day. 26% are not involved in organised sport, 71% are too sedentary, Discussion in the media focused on the seduction of screens such as tablets, computers television and phones. As an adult , I know how screen activities can sap the time in which one could be outside in the sunshine exercising, however there is more to this than the wonders and availability of very attractive technology.

Deprived of open space and adventure

A generation ago and before that, there was a lot more open space which enticed children outdoors when they were not in school. Incidental activity, exploring interesting places in nature or in the local neighbourhood is not just beneficial but essential to children in developing their imaginations, experiencing and dealing with unpredictable situations without rules and the directions and supervision of an adult. This used to be easy to access in the street, in vacant land, parks and the private backyard and friends backyards. There was plenty of space to explore in the suburbs.

There is a huge difference between sitting on the couch in front of a screen from 4- 6.30pm and actively playing in the local environment. It is not necessary to have a strenuous game of basketball for the body and mind to register a level of exercise and a 3 dimensional experience . Furthermore sitting is supposed be the most unhealthy thing to do for hours on end and it makes you fat! For that reason I will not make this a very long article.

Victims of blinkered planners and growth lobby

The push to make our cities more crowded by increasing the population very fast, densifying suburbs and removing private space including backyards is not going to help this terrible situation with the health of Australia’s children. It has to make it worse. Our politicians show no care at all for the welfare of Australia’s citizens. I understand that many of Melbourne’s’ private schools have built all over their playing fields and now have to bus their students to public areas to play sport. I suppose the children just sit during lunch hour because with no sports areas they could not spontaneously start a ball game.

Unnatural

It’s unnatural, anyway for children to sit all day at desks listening to teachers and severing all their avenues of expressing themselves physically adds insult to injury.

A child living in an apartment, will naturally turn to his/her tablet or phone for entertainment if the only outside alternative is a concrete balcony. A trompe l'eouil on the back wall of the 2x3 metre couryard, however far it backons cannot acccommodate the need of a child to run. We have not made Australia better over the past 50 years. The "age of entitlement is over" and for what? What really have we gained as a society?

Massive decline in children's fitness

Two generations ago, we had a nation very well represented in international sport partly because, I believe most children had a chance at participating even if it was just making a “100 in the backyard at Mum’s” or hitting a tennis ball on a broken -down asphalt court, but now it seems we have a generation of unfit young people unlikely to live as long as their parents. The social engineers and economists are always complaining about the aging population but if people start dying younger, the achievement of longer life expectancy will be just a nostalgic memory.