I'm getting into my classical music collection lately. I've not really given these CDs a spin in the last few years or so, partly because I'm always looking for new stuff and they get buried behind my newer purchases. And the funny thing about one's music sitting on the shelf is that it's simply a case of out-of-sight-out-of-mind. You're constantly listening to what's at the front and not at the back of shelves. Anyway, what with the pandemic going on, I've decided to re-import all my CDs into my mac as Apple Lossless files - a task that's simply been overdue for years but rivalled in tedium only by playing monopoly and sitting in casinos without gambling. Bye-bye 192kbps, and all that. Theoretically, I shouldn't even need my discs after I've imported them because I'd have them as lossless files sitting at my fingertips on my computer. I should just be able to pack the damn things away and stick them in storage.
...And I just can't. I've been pondering why that might be the case. I think it's because I am despite my own protestations and denials, just another one of those people who are way too in love with their record spines and CD spines. You see, it's like my autobiography writ large on those spines. The where and when of purchasing some stupid album that was hard to find; The time I was in city 'x' and I happened to come across 'y'; the tortuous quest to find a copy of 'z'. Those kinds of mini-narratives tied in with a weird sense of identity tangled up with an emotional attachment makes it really hard to just say, "you know what? These can go in plastic tubs and sit-in storage now."
So that's pretty much the lot of a media hoarder.
I don't own valuable stuff. I don't have any gems, jewellery or exotic coins or for that matter bars of gold. I don't own memorabilia and collectibles - I've just got music and movies. Even my sort-of-dress-watch isn't really all that valuable in the watch stakes. A watch repairer tried to sell me a beautiful replacement band once. I had to say no because the band was 5 times what I paid for my watch. I don't even own memorabilia discs like signed copies of CDs and LPs. I just have the regular music stuff, and that's what I can't really leave behind - but collectively I like them. It's a big chunk of my life. How'bout you?
The late Sam de Brito had a complaint against the ALP's swap of leaders from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard. It was often cited that Kevin Rudd was a terrible boss. De Brito wrote in his column we've all had terrible bosses and we've still turned up to work. What excuse has an elected body got in refusing to work for a terrible boss elected by the very people of the land, really?
Of course it has transpired since then that both sides of politics have seen fit to swap out the leader at semi-regular intervals since the Rudd removal. None of these Prime Ministers have served out a full term and Scomo might be the first one to do so since John Howard. That's a long time between stability - not that stability is any good if the leadership is as rotten as the current Coalition.
This is something you pick up in life along the way but terrible bosses are par for the course. You can do worse than a terrible boss, and that might be a criminal boss. All the same, barring the criminal boss type, chances are most people have a terrible boss. This is because nothing brings out the asshole in somebody than the entitlements of leadership, When I was younger, I found myself at the outpost of a Japanese corporate behemoth. I had a boss to whom I reported, who was a certifiable asshole, but his boss on top of that was an alarmingly incompetent man. This boss was terrible because he was functionally paralysed when it came to making decisions. It was alarming how he was willing to let things just happen by not making a decision. This was because to him, making the wrong decision was worse than the consequences of not making any decisions. It was excruciating to sit through one of those glum meetings the Japanese companies have, waiting for him to make a decision - any damn decision - and not getting anything conclusive out of him beyond an uncomfortable cough-grunt-throat-clearing-noise.
It took me a while to understand that most terrible bosses don't know they're terrible. Some of them are misguided in thinking that they're great bosses. Your average boss, like your average anything, is terrible at their job. This is mostly due to the Peter Principle where people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. Another element that can go into the mix is that your average boss has no empathy. The empathy deficit is usually the blindspot through which all their interpersonal disasters come marching in. Woe betide us if they happen to be disorganised or lazy or not good at solving problems for themselves. It's a lot easier to be a terrible boss than a good one. There's a reason Captain Kirk with all his faults is considered a good captain. It was a show written by ex-navy people who had seen terrible captains. We might laugh at Captain Kirk, but golly there are probably much worse captains in real life commanding real navy ships of the line.
But even allowing for all that, the little tyrant I worked for, was a particularly terrible, awful, crappy boss from infantile-boss-hell that inspired half an album's worth of songs why I wanted to stop working for him.
This lockdown in Sydney is dragging on. As much as I don't quite mind pottering around the house Working on tracks, the general absence of fresh stimulus beyond the available news, TV and the MLB season is getting me down. Sometime around early December they think we'll be back to pretending things are normal. Maybe they really would be like the old normal except Anti-vaxxers will get the Delta strain and drop off and die - and maybe to be a little uncharitable, it's one of those Darwin Award moments when people who can't adapt to the new environment are surely going to face a very Darwinian selection pressure.
I do wonder about that. I have a colleague at my day job who is a nice dude but he's a conspiracy theorist and Anti-vaxxer nut-job. He hates the lockdown but he refuses to get any of the vaccines because he thinks they kill people. I've had to explain to him how vaccines work, how these vaccines work differently, and how much research has gone into them prior to the pandemic to allow them to simply come up with these in a matter of months, and how statistically speaking, one would be much safer to just take the vaccine than risk getting COVID-19. No dice. He wants to go without any vaccines.
Even the medical officer in the office has explained to him the risks and as far as I can tell he's not taken on board any of the medical officer's advice. It's a bit perplexing as well as disturbing - I don't want him to die. But if he were to get sick badly, I would get to say "told ya' so" upon his recovery. Naturally I feel very conflicted about that, and admittedly, that's not how one wants things to turn out.
Still, I get the optimism going around. 4 months of lockdown this time around has been bleak. It's like we're all in our own Biosphere 2 experiment where we hole up pretending we're on an extended expedition to Mars, and just like with the Biosphere 2 crew we allow ourselves to cheat and so we go out once a week for groceries. But then the whole world seems less tangible when you're living like this. When we first went into any kind of lockdown in March 2020, nobody had the vaccine. Now we're reaching the point where firmly over 50% of people have had 2 doses and over 75% have had at least 1. Things have changed significantly in 18 months. We now have a fighting chance against this lousy pandemic. If we can just get out of here, like in the Paul McCartney song, we might feel anything is possible. Maybe we should be just a little more optimistic.
Misery Loves Company, That's Why We Have Relationships
Maybe that's not quite true, but you do see quite a number of people who are together and you have no idea how their dynamic works for them.
I used to know this girl who went through life hating on just about everything. She was a pretty redhead with curls, well-liked, and even quite popular amongst her peers; but if you caught her in private she would share with you the most vile gossip, and let her contempt flow. Even as a third year university student going through my own emotional chaos on campus, I found it a bit much how she would dissect the foibles of the people around her. It was merciless and two-faced, and in part hid a deep anguish.
Anyway, it turned out she had a very troubled upbringing up in a provincial centre and had problems adjusting to Sydney. Her mother had told her to aim high, while her estranged father had told her she wouldn't ever amount to anything. Deep underneath all the eviscerating critique was this general sense of dissonance with dissatisfaction and annoyance at life together with a singular wish to tear everything down. She was bitter but funny, or perhaps she was just funny because she was so bitter. As a friend, she was a mean teaser and prankster.
The thing is we hung out because we were both miserable. I was kind of used to it - it as in being miserable, so I hardly noticed the depth of her misery. I'd had a run of girlfriends who had a way of making me feel miserable, so I thought it was normal. Misery had become second nature to me. Some would say it was my first nature. And the one thing through all that which has stuck with me to this day is that miserable people can be very funny but they have a way of making everyday life seem really trying.
It's not like everyday life should be trying as a university student, but that's the nature of misery - it inflicts a sense of grave dissatisfaction on those around the miserable. It was a strained friendship though a bizarre round of varsity parties and drinks. We talked, she held court, we laughed, she got drunk and nasty - but we'd do it all again within days. Eventually at the end of Trinity semester in her second year, she abruptly quit university and went home to her provincial town without an explanation.
Just once - about a month after her sudden departure - she sent an ironic postcard from her home town. It read "everywhere I go, there's me. And if there's one thing I can't stand, it's me."
I knew this guy Ron who broke up with his wife. It was a very bad breakup - the kind that involved being blindsided by betrayals and much backstabbing. It poisoned his circle of friends because his wife had run off with his best friend. In the aftermath his now ex-friend and ex-wife spread gossip about him and it left you wondering how Ron could be so blind to have chosen these people to be in his life to begin with.
Ron was a nice guy but he was a terrible judge of character. That sounds incredibly old fashioned to say so, but you had to look where he was in the wake of that messy split. And yet because Ron was an oddly cheerful guy, he somehow internalised all of it like it was his fault that these people were pushed into doing these terrible things to him because he had been an awful person to them. That led to some bizarre conversations. Nonetheless, Rob was clearly the aggrieved party. He just didn't want to be that. That's some complicated mental gymnastics to arrive there.
For my part, when break ups happen I tend to be a lot more definitive about who did what and who was to blame. I kind of feel people should take ownership of stuff they do that hurts other people. Doing terrible things to another person is one thing, but pretending you didn't do them or shifting that blame on to the victim makes things worse. People do as they must do. If you have to get out of a situation then, that's what you have to do. If you have to have an affair; if you have to betray the confidence of somebody in order to do something; if you have to fuck up somebody's life to just do your thing; these are the kinds of things you have to own. You did this because you wanted to, and it was shitty a thing to do but you did it anyway. You have to own that shit. Otherwise you are not a proper adult.
When Pharmakeus was fresh out of University with his Arts degree, he used to pontificate a lot on a whole bunch of subjects. He would talk at great length about the ins and out of Post Modernism as it was unfolding, or how fractals defined the very shape of life, the universe and everything. He was full of this kind of intellectual excitement. One day as we sat in a park bench he made the joke that a person only had a certain words in the that they could utter in a lifetime. His girlfriend of that time quipped "I'd better prepare your funeral for tonight then?"
He didn't die that night - in fact he is still alive and well. Yet these days he communicates in brusque utterances of monosyllabic grunts. Maybe he did run out of words.
I don't know about life, but certainly work, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
It's hard to get everything in a job. The kinds of casual jobs I had in my teens were relatively low pressure but low pay. It was interesting when I worked at the music shop in Chatswood, but that paid very little. It paid a little better to move tubs of groceries around the parcel pickup service at Grace Brothers. The bosses were kind of dumb and the work itself was unrelenting tedium, but it paid something. Coming out of my teens and in my early 20s, I lucked out and got to work at the ABC. The ABC was great - I had a great boss and the boss above her was great. There was a bit of pressure and responsibility, and there were lots of interesting bits of gear with which to play. And you learned a lot just being there. After that job I went back to study and when I came out the other end, we were slap bang in Paul Keating's recession-that-we-had-to-have. So I was back to being more, in-and-out-of unemployment for some time. After a series of interesting gigs I landed a steady job making educational videos. It was interesting work and my colleagues were great but my boss was grumpy and the pay was low. I was sort of okay with my boss but then he hired an EP specifically to bully me - he told me so - so that was pretty bad. But then the EP quit once I told the whole office about that situation. After which my boss sold the company and retired early. I've often thought he probably did that just to see the back of me.
After that I ended up at a production house making corporates. It didn't pay well, the work was soul destroying and my colleagues were shit. Just seriously smug, petty, shitty people. The experience kind of burned a hole in my soul. After going freelance and bumming around again going gig-to-gig, I ended up working for an events production company with that little tyrant. The work was okay considering it wasn't my area, the pay was okay, job security was not, and I kind of knew it was going to blow up one day - not because I hated the job or anything, but because the emotional immaturity of the little tyrant made it inevitable that everybody ended on bad terms with him and left. It was just a matter of time. Considering all that, I think I lasted a good little while there. The life lesson there is that I don't have issues working with assholes, but assholes are always going to be assholes. I can control how I feel about working for assholes, but I can't control asshole bosses.
All this is to day it's hard to get much work satisfaction when you don't work in your area; and it's hard to get a lot of money when you do work in your area and like doing what you do, because they know it, and low ball you. As a result I've decided I can handle boredom but not stress, especially if I'm not going to work in my area. Chances are if you do something boring, it will pay a bit better than if you do something interesting.
When I was a teen I read 'Le Morte D'Arthur' by Sir Thomas Malory. The Penguin Classic edition then came in two volumes and the print was rather small and dense. I read it in the school library, and then I read it again when I was in first year at Med School. Eventually I lent my two volumes to somebody and they never came back. Went some years without it and it felt like such a hole on my bookshelf. Subsequently I ended top with a hard cover edition.
Historically speaking, this book is a bit of a landmark. William Caxton, who brought the printing press to the UK, published 'Le Morte D'Arthur' in 1485. By the time Caxton came to publishing it, he had already been a publisher of a number of books on the topic of knights and romances. You could say he was middlebrow from the beginning of publishing. He was a businessman who knew what his readership wanted, and it wasn't the Bible. Somehow this is the book that outlasted the rest of Caxton's catalogue. The book itself reads quite a bit like passages of Tolkien in his more terse moods - more Silmarillion and less Lord of the Rings with Tom Bombadil. Of course, it was hard to read it without Monty Python voices going on in my head, even though Malory is about as funny as a haemorrhoid.
In the main, the book is a longwinded account of how King Arthur's court fails, and at the centre of it is that romantic triangle: King Arthur, his wife Guinevere, and his best night Sir Lancelot are in love. The latter two's affair essentially tears down the dignity of Arthur. Arthur's kinsmen are outraged, and so eventually this pits one half of the knights of the round table against the other half. The passions described are primal and wild. And all through this mess, King Arthur just wants his wife to come home. He doesn't seem to judge, he only laments the sate of affairs. It's not entirely clear what good Arthur does as king (or what his fiscal policy settings are, for instance), but it is accepted that he's a good king. The weird thing is just how much energy is spent on the affair in the book. On one level the book is an extensive exploration of the simple phenomenon that women are not for men to own - they have their own volition and they will do as they see fit. On another, it's a laundry list of feats by knights. And if they had a hint of James Brown in them, they would understand that it all means nothing without a woman.
The publishing date of the book is of course closer to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine where the idea of romance was nurtured, than the first suffragettes to challenge patriarchy; so it's hardly a feminist critique of masculinity in the dark ages. The story does explore the problems of pushing for romantic love in the context of inherently political beings. It's one thing for the baker's wife to be secretly in love with the blacksmith, it is a lot more problematic when they are kings, queens, and generals. As much time as the story spends on Guinevere in the arms of Sir Lancelot away from Camelot, it really centres on the plaintive wish of King Arthur that Guinevere changes her mind and comes home to him. It is not clear whether King Arthur's love for his queen is of the romantic variety, or because he's just meant to love her for the sake of status or the narrative itself.
There has been little transparency over the funds, the Per Capita report commissioned by GetUp found, with some allegedly delivered based on political opportunity over community need. Report author Matt Lloyd-Cape noted there were few checks on how state governments spent the allocated funds.
"We spent around three months tracking down data for this project, when really the government should be ensuring that the general public, and more importantly bushfire survivors, know exactly what is happening with the funds allocated to the recovery," Mr Lloyd Cape said.
Only 42 per cent of the $565 million emergency payments have been paid to communities burned out by the fires. A year on, too many families are still waiting for support, says GetUp national director Paul Oosting.
"Scott Morrison must explain to the families still living in tents and caravans, a year after losing their homes, his government's painstakingly slow response," Mr Oosting said.
"There is clear evidence of multiple process failures to allocate funds directly to survivors."
I don't know if it's a conservative person thing to suspect everybody who comes to the government for money is somehow a freeloader to be despised or some shonky charlatan. It's something I noticed way back when I would go to try and get funding for projects, and the government would put up form after form to be filled and then deflect your request int a bottomless pit of other requests that were not met. Even this business of getting a vaccination certificate from MyGov is fraught with this kind of going around in circles of links across umpteen webpages. This government knows how to frustrate people in such a way as to deny them their needs.
The desire for small government is such that it makes it nearly impossible to pin the government down on its responsibilities - but it's happy to chase you around for yours. Heck they chase people around for imaginary debts with robocalls. It's enough to drive people to the areas of conspiracist nut jobs.
And it's proud of it too, this government. Which is pretty freaking awful.
Anyway, I really feel for the people who are now in the second year after their houses burned down, still trying to get some help from the government. It's pretty fucking shameful is what it is. You would not want to be in their shoes.
When Greta Thunberg went to the UN and told the leaders their houses were on fire, Morrison's response was to patronise and downplay the fear of the young. The fact that he thought that was the appropriate response beggars belief. Couldn't he see it from the young person's side? That they're going to inherit a planet largely fucked up by people who refused to let anybody fix things?
It sort of amazes me just how much of an empathy deficit Scott Morrison possesses and somehow still managed to become leader of the Liberal Party, let alone Prime Minster of this country. It is like that expression about blind squirrels getting lucky once in a while in finding a nut. In his case he was surrounded by even more demented sociopaths like Peter Dutton and Angus Taylor - he was the least objectionable sociopath in the room after they all decided to stab Turnbull in the back lest he do something about the climate.
I do wonder if Scott Morrison wonders about how the planet will be in say, 10 years' time when his daughters will be pushing out babies. I imagine his daughters are so brainwashed that they would do all kinds of mental gymnastics to push out of their minds that their father - once the Prime Minister of Australia - opted to wave a lump of coal around Parliament and make like Global Warming wasn't a thing. They're beyond hope, in all likelihood. But maybe the arrival of grandkids might make him think just a little bit about where things went so wrong and his part in making sure it went wrong. I wonder, as the prognosis towards 2050 worsens significantly, whether he might ever have just a twinge of regret that he spent his time in government as a minister selling down the future of his grandkids just so he could get votes in the 2010s. I mean, that's what the exchange that he made, right there. The rest of us voting chumps were powerless once he was in office. Nobody forced him to be this awful. He simply volunteered himself for the task.
It is terrible enough that his government goes from rape scandal to AG-is-a-rapist-scandal, then failure to disaster to catastrophe, but this has been going for nearly a decade. Every minute spent by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government denying Global Warming was an issue, stole something from the future. Things might have been better if he'd just stayed in Hawai and never come back.
I'm still bummed about just how many animals lost their lives in the Black Summer bushfires.
I've tried a few times to come at it here but I end up writing ever more of the same kind of denunciation of the current government. It's hard to denounce tis government in new ways given that the way in which they are profoundly so fucked is so singular. At a certain point we have to swallow our discontent and reservations and say it is what it is.
Still, I can't help but wonder if I had any control over the events; and about the only control I had was to vote against this government who had basically jettisoned any idea of proper emissions control back in 2014. I've voted against theme every time, and still they kept winning the hearts and minds of arseholes who think emissions control shouldn't happen or should cost them nothing. A lot of them claim to be patriots which is laughable because how could you claim to love this land if you're willing to let whole ecosystems go up in smoke? Those people have no credibility. We should be incredulous.
And still they are in power, letting bad shit happen and claiming not to "hold the hose". It's that kind of hands-off-the-wheel impression this government gives off about anything to do with Global Warming that gets my goat. If they had listened to the professional advice, they would have acted accordingly and put some money aside for the necessary equipment and labour for the fire season ahead. Instead they cut those budgets and spent it on pork barrelling sports rorts instead. After they won their 'miraculous' election (pardon me while I go vomit), they were bewildered to find they still held office and had pressing responsibilities.
It's not that the fires came from nowhere - the government was warned by experts. For them to pretend that things were out of control because this was all 'acts fo God' was ridiculous to the extreme. On some level we can say we brought this on ourselves for having voted in this mendacious government. Except the animals that perished in the fires didn't get a vote - They for one didn't vote for this shitty government. They didn't ask for this mess. What happened to them was totally tragic.
I've written this before. I thought the 1990s were great. It was great in the wake of the end of the Cold War and many things seemed possible. Movies were fun, rock was resurgent, new things were going on in music, books were fun and interesting. It was like a flowering of ideas after a very long repression. I used to wonder how is this beautiful era going to end? I guess we found out with two things. The first was the election of Dubya, aka George W Bush as President. It was a cliff hanger that went to the supreme court and somehow the Republican lawyers wrested the outcome from Al Gore. It was the moment the Republicans allowed themselves to overtly break the rules and law to have their way. It would turn out to be an appetiser for the kind of shenanigans to follow.
The second thing was 9/11. After the Twin Towers came down, all bets were off. The world changed overnight and suddenly we were 'at war' with 'terror'. A flood of rhetoric washed out from the White House that led to things like the war in Afghanistan (probably legit) and the Marin Iraq *definitely not legit) as well as a slew of anti-terror laws and overreach by surveillance. The last two decades continue to be marred by the responses to 9/11 which were more often than not over-reactions. Yes, nearly 4000 people died and a whole slew of system failures were exposed as well as giving birth to the internet conspiracy theory culture, but it has to be said the trillions spent on prosecuting the foreign wars and surveilling the domestic population is a ridiculously expensive price to pay.
In that time America watered down its education and health to move money to its military industrial complex, and essentially created a generation of under-educated idiots susceptible to conspiracy theories on the internet. The worst aspects of that as blowback could be seen in the storming of the US Capitol earlier this year.
Let's say that is all by-the-by. 9/11 happened because of a string of incompetent decisions as well and lack of leadership to act on reports. The FBI had reports it didn't follow up. The CIA delivered reports to the White House that the White House did not follow up. It was so slack entire areas of conspiracy theories have grown up around them but the essential truth is that the government of the day, the Bush Jr Administration, was largely asleep at the wheel. And when the dust settled, the republican administration used it as an opportunity to overreach on surveillance and expand powers. They say in politics one should never let a good crisis go to waste, but that sort of cynicism was exactly what characterised the events that followed. To protect democracy, they decided to circumvent democracy. We are still living with the consequences of those terrible decisions.
My God What Have We Done?
There is a leader of Islamist thought Aga Khan IV who believes that 9/11 is a direct result of the world community ignoring the plight of the human tragedy of Afghanistan at the time. It is hard to argue with it if you remember what Afghanistan under the Taliban the first time around was like. It was repressive, regressive, iconoclastic, and most certainly toxic and misogynistic in a way that is off the scales for contemporary people living civilised society.
Throughout the 1990s we sort of let all of that slide. They were very much on the nose but we had a way of pretending it was too far away to matter. I am certain that we will fall into that mindset again soon enough, but for the record most people didn't know where Kabul was on the map until the Americans finally sent troops.
I think about that indifference a lot. In stark contrast to the globalised congeniality of the 1990s, there were plenty of people suffering under terrible regimes. We were very casual about the plight of people in the islamic world, partly because we didn't want to tell them how to run their governments. The world was celebrating and partying to the end of the Cold War. Bad Islamist governance in Kabul was like a distant problem we really didn't want to know about.
There is a very telling episode of 'Seinfeld' from the 1990s that illustrates this point. It's the episode titled 'The Visa'. It aired in January 1993 which feels like yesterday in some weird way; at least a lot closer to 9/11 than where we are today.
George meets a lawyer named Cheryl (Maggie Han) who thinks he's very funny. When he tells Jerry and Elaine, they enthusiastically plan a double date, much to George's dismay, as he imagines himself being upstaged by Jerry. At the restaurant, Elaine asks Cheryl for advice on dealing with the lawsuit from Ping, the Chinese food delivery boy whom Elaine injured in "The Virgin". Cheryl reveals that she is the prosecuting attorney in the case, as Ping is her cousin. Jerry and Elaine joke about this coincidence, making Cheryl laugh hysterically. While she is away, George makes them promise not to be funny around her. Jerry overdoes it, making comments that are so morbid that Cheryl is depressed by the end of the date.
At Jerry's apartment, Kramer returns early from baseball fantasy camp, where he accidentally punched Mickey Mantle. Elaine sees Cheryl with George and thanks her for persuading Ping to drop the case. She says that she did that because they all seemed like such nice people. As Elaine is giving Jerry the mail that she has been holding for him while he was out of town, Babu Bhatt, the Pakistani who Jerry tried to help in "The Cafe", is hauled off by the INS. Jerry had helped him get a job and the apartment down the hall. Jerry and Elaine discover Babu's Visa renewal form in Jerry's belated mail; it had been delivered to Jerry's address by mistake. They go to the jail where Babu is being held. When they tell him what happened he becomes angry. Jerry promises to straighten things out.
Jerry has lunch with Cheryl, where he continues his morose façade, so that he can ask her to solve Babu's problems with the INS. When she sees George, she confesses that she is attracted to Jerry's dark, disturbed personality. George, realizing his scheme has backfired, tells her the truth. Stunned at this revelation, she gets up and leaves.
At Jerry's apartment, Elaine sees Ping and thanks him for dropping the case. He sneers and tells her the case is back on because they all made Cheryl mad due to Jerry's deception. Babu's brother enters and says Babu has been deported, since Cheryl neglected to follow through on the favor after George's revelation. Back in Pakistan, Babu swears eternal vengeance against Jerry.
Ouch. At the time I watched this episode, I really felt for Babu. I laughed - but I knew Babu's problems were very real, as opposed to the decidedly trivial preoccupations and obsessions of all of the characters in 'Seinfeld'. The reality gap as it were, was what made it very black humour. It turned out to be very prescient. When 9/11 happened, Babu came to mind. 9/11 was Babu exacting vengeance upon us for our indifference.
How Did We End Up There?
We may ask ourselves how it is we were still stationing troops in Afghanistan all these years later, until last month. The protracted history of bad decisions goes a long way back, but it may point to the funding and arming of Mujihadeen resistance fighters against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By training those people and arming them, and then beating the Soviets out of Afghanistan they decided that the West could be beaten. And in abandoning Afghanistan to its own devices in the 1990s led to a Taliban government which saw fit to harbour Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. Without going into the various theories - conspiracy and otherwise - about whether Al Qaeda was really a thing or merely a designation/conflagration by the CIA, it is true that Afghanistan as a state went rogue and allowed itself to sponsor terrorism abroad, and it was this lack of judgement that led to 9/11 and the subsequent war and occupation of Afghanistan.
That's all on one side. The other side is the utter lack of judgement on the side of the what became known as the Coalition of the Willing. That was the countries led by the USA that was happy to march into both Afghanistan and Iraq. Australia's part in it is pretty sorry. We sent our best troops and as they stayed and stayed, they became psychopaths on safari, committing acts that can only be described as war crimes. Nobody thought we would be there for so long, but without judgment there was no way of pulling out of Afghanistan without pulling down the state of Afghanistan we set up in the wake of the Taliban.
It took a President even worse than George W Bush to get the USA out of Afghanistan and his solution was simply to give up Afghanistan to the very same Taliban the USA ousted in 2002. The mind boggles. It's as if Donald Trump slept through 9/11 and missed it completely. Or didn't really care. Maybe he did us all a favour in ending a forever war, and we are all looking that gift horse in the mouth. Maybe Afghanistan is better off under the Taliban, as a beacon of intolerance and religious extremism and medieval legalism. After all, why should we spend money on a place that doesn't want to conform to a civilised world? Maybe we can enjoy a decade of no wars; because I feel like we should maybe party a little bit like it's 1999, once this pandemic lifts.
There are people in Afghanistan who are angry the West left, and let them in that terrible Dark Ages limbo. Yet it is easily arguable that we shouldn't have been there at all for as long as we were. At some point we can't fight the geopolitical gravity forever. Whatever goes up to Afghanistan must come down.
So Will It Happen Again?
With any luck, with all the civil liberties we have given up, and all the compromises to our democracy, the one thing that won't happen again is a 9/11. Is it a high price to pay? Probably in as much as it still doesn't guarantee it won't happen again - but it is highly unlikely. Bitter lessons were learnt at all levels of government everywhere.
As of that day, governments have given licences to themselves to compromise your privacy in exchange for security, and maybe we're all safer for it, but we are definitely not better for it. And I for one believe it when military people say we will be back in Afghanistan soon enough. It's just a terrible enough situation to draw us in. With any luck it will be the Chinese who end up trying to sort out that mess instead of us. That, would be a better outcome. Let somebody else suffer Afghanistan instead.
Thanks to this lousy pandemic 2 years has felt like a long time. We're all sitting around for things to get back to normal even though that might not really be on the cards. All the same, 2019 feels like a long way back. There was that lousy election that Scomo won in May that year, weird recriminations about the ALP losing the unlosable election and then there were the Black Summer bushfires.
In late 2019 I was working on a bunch of songs where I was experimenting with modes and hiding the key centre. As usual I was struggling for material for, lyrics so I was writing them off headlines of news articles - when in doubt, 3 act story across 3 verses, chorus to bang home the main sentiment, a bridge to offer commentary, stick in the obligatory guitar solo for kicks - Bob's your song-writing uncle.
Then I had a 2 week bout of some weird bowel infection. Maybe it was salmonella from bad chicken. I don't know. I think I was on the can more or less for 2 straight weeks. It was so bad I couldn't sleep at night because I had to get up and sit on the can and let the brown liquid pour out of my backside. The trickle never seemed to end. The bushfires that went totally out of control were already flooding Sydney with this orange smoke. As I sat late nights/early morning on the toilet with the window open, breathing in the fumes of my own diarrhoea and the smoke from the worst bushfire I had seen, wondering if I was just going to die on the toilet seat... something snapped. I couldn't take it any more.
New Years came and went. The Pandemic was starting up in China with suspicions that it had already snuck into Sydney. And then I saw the images of just what the people of Mallacoota had endured. It was beyond alarming and utterly appalling. People had spent the night in the ocean off the pier looking up at the burning night skies. Ash fell like snowflakes from the angry red skies. Their homes went up in the hellfire. From the treetops they could hear the screams of burning koalas. That account left me devastated. What were my problems with breathing in the smoke fumes and suffering from that 2 week diarrhoea next to their suffering?
So the next thing I knew, I abandoned that project I had been working on, and did these songs about the bushfires and global warming and how colossally, irredeemably, comprehensively, stupide are our political leaders.
One of the things that the people-against-doing-anything-about-Global-Warming complain about is the cost of cutting emissions. What's it going to cost? What's it going to cost me? It's the general line of questioning they trot out like somehow the costs of Global Warming are insignificant. If there's one thing that's become evident in the pandemic it's that there are a whole cabal of people who think any social restriction or imposition on their lifestyle in order to preserve the society in which we want to live, is just too much. Masks? No. Social distancing? No. Restricting movements? Hell no. Vaccines? No way. And on and on it goes. Let's face it, they're literally sociopaths.
Let us then subtract the sociopathic out of the discussion and address the reasonable question of cost - i.e. what's it going to take to seriously cut down emissions in Australia? Turns out, not a whole lot.
The general idea is to replace technologies that still run on combustion with alternatives that run on renewable electricity: swap petrol cars for electric vehicles (EVs) and gas heaters with reverse-cycle air conditioners.
By electrifying everything that can be electrified, Australia could cut its emissions by 80 per cent by 2035, according to credible estimates.
And it wouldn't need to invent any new technology to do this.
"It is an easy slam dunk," Dr Griffith said.
"It's not even particularly invasive to our quality of life.
"For every other country, including America, it's much harder and the economics are not as good."
<...>
Dr Griffith estimates the acquisitions would cost about $100,000 per household.
Multiplying that by Australia's 10 million households equals $ 1 trillion.
But a lot of this is money that households would have spent anyway to replace cars, heaters and so on, Dr Griffith points out.
The only difference is they're buying an electrical version.
Most households buy a new car about every 10 years.
Big appliances like hot water heaters can last 20-30 years, but households may be encouraged to switch earlier by considering the savings generated by using cheaper electricity over gas.
"If you started replacing those machines in 10 million houses and you took until 2030 to do it — so roughly a million houses a year — by about 2024, every household that's done that will be saving a few thousand dollars a year," Dr Griffith said.
"By 2030, 100 per cent of homes would be saving [$5,000 or $6,000) a year on their current costs of owning cars and powering their house."
The one country that could just reap the benefits of lots of sunshine and wind is refusing to make the transition because the fossil fuel lobby donates so much money to the political establishment, making out this transition is much too onerous. I guess they're desperately defending their meal ticket but come on, we don't want to feed them at the expense of our lives.
Here's the thing: We don't even need to move over to hydrogen fuels stored in Ammonia and Magnesium Hydrides. We just plug ourselves into the naturally abundant renewables. It's not onerous at all. Australia is uniquely well placed to just electrify stuff and reap tremendous emission control dividends.
You could say it's a no-brainer but of course our political leaders are without brains. They want a gas-led transition. You can't make up this stuff. The writing is on the wall and these idiots are claiming there are hidden messages in that writing saying gas is a good idea.
The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year.
Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has faced growing international condemnation and pressure from advertisers over its editorial stance on climate change, which has long cast doubt over the science behind global warming and has since 2007 attacked various federal government efforts to reduce emissions.
I don't know how that is going to work in practical terms. It's a global organisation that's dedicated itself to denying the simple reality of Global Warming, applying as much pressure as it can on conservatives and progressives alike so as not to enact any policies for mitigating the effects of Global Warming. By the time they were behind Tony Abbott calling the Emissions Trading Scheme a 'tax on carbon' you knew they weren't even market rationalists. They were just deranged. It's almost as if they wanted Global Warming to have its full impact so they would never run out of headlines about natural disasters. But now they're changing their tune, they say.
As the contemporary internet meme-parlance like to spell it, "wut?"
I imagine it's a bit like the Pope pushing for birth control and priests having to toe that line or US police force unions donating money to BLM from now on and promising to pay to raise the orphans created by their police brutality or something. It's a bit like a wild fox promising not to stalk the henhouse and will now bring the chooks their daily feed - they are Fox News after all. Yeah right. I guess we're going to have to see it to believe it.
The switch in editorial position will likely attract global attention, particularly in America, where Murdoch’s media outlets, such as Fox News, have also been accused by Republican politicians of undermining global efforts on climate change. Mr Murdoch, now 90, also remains an influential figure in British politics, mainly through his newspapers, The Sun and The Times. But his eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, who is the co-executive chairman of News Corp, is more involved in the newspaper business than his father.
The article goes on to claim the shift is because of the big powwow wherein Australia is pretty much going to have its arm twisted by other OECD nations and as such it would hurt the Coalition brand if it ended up being attacked by News Corp as well as the ALP as they go headlong into the next election. Frankly, it's not like News Corp don't know on which side the bread is buttered. If they hamstring the Coalition so much that they cannot enact any policies on emissions, there might come a day when the Coalition might be un-electable (Dare I say they ought to be considered un-electable today but heck they've won the last 3 Federal elections on no climate policy so who am I to judge?).
It might sound a bit cynical even to suggest this - not that News Corp is anything but cynical themselves - but the likely tone they will take on all this is that we should mitigate our response to the climate threat. Which is to say they will likely weasel-word their way into a position that says "yes, Global Warming is here but maybe we don't have to do the hysterical maximum to combat its effect. What we need to do is the reasonable minimum so we don't harm the economy." Which would still very much be a denial stance - just one that seems to barely accomodate the reality of Global Warming. A bit like acknowledging a dancing drunk elephant in a tiny room.
Eesh. That's going to be just as spew-worthy as what they're doing today and of no help whatsoever. Let's just say unlike a leopard, a fox can't change its spots because it never had spots to begin with.
If you've been a long time reader of this blog, you know I'm staunchly in favour of liberal democracy over fascism or communism or abject anarchy. So what I'm about to write next needs that stated before proceeding because I don't want this to be interpreted as a fascist screed railing against populism.
One of the vexing things about democracy is that the majority gets their way even if it's a bad idea. That's kind of it. It's a natural derivative of the decision making chain, but the way it works out for big policy items is terrible. Global Warming has been on the agenda since the late 1980s. Since then I've watched as successive Australian governments mostly tried to put off doing anything about Global Warming. The early list of recalcitrants include Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, and John Howard. John Howard was particularly bad in that he kept pushing off the discussion, striking the pose of a reasonable sceptic. Maybe the scientists were wrong, he argued. Like, all of them? Really?
Kevin Rudd was the only Prime Minister who went to election claiming Global Warming was indeed a priority issue, and thanks to a drought at the time he was able to drive that point home and win. He went to Copenhagen to negotiate something tangible and as Copenhagen talks failed, he expended his political capital. Then, of course Rudd was undone by Julia Gillard who promptly went to election promising not to do anything about Global Warming (and was forced to the table to negotiate with the Greens who made her do something-not-nothing). Tony Abbott used that back-up to get into government with the promise to undo what the Gillard/ALP-Green government had done. He had no intention of doing anything about Global Warming. Malcolm Turnbull who replaced him ostensibly did want to do something about it, but his denialist party hamstring him enough that he could not do anything - but that is of course like a dog eating his homework. He was then unseated by our current imbecile Prime Minister Scomo who is aspirational about zero emissions by 2050. Will he do anything about it? Not if his new deputy PM and erstwhile denialist nut job Barnaby Joyce has anything to say - and of course Joyce has a lot of dumb things to say about climate.
The personally alarming thing about that sequence of bad-for-the-environment Australian Governments is that it covers 30 years and only the 3 years with Kevin Rudd marked a moment of leadership on Global Warming. 90% of the time, our governments put other things as their priority. Now, I'm not crazy, I understand things like Mabo, tighter gun laws, Post-9/11-war-on-terror, disability insurance, and budget deficits are kind of important. Be that as it may, we all live on this planet and if we fuck it all up, there's no point having surpluses on budgets or Aboriginal Native Titles on a scorched Earth. I'm sorry but that's just the pragmatic reality. I was about to include the GFC on that list but amazingly Kevin Rudd's government was dealing with that while still putting Global Warming front and centre. He had his faults but his priorities were not one of them. In fact, with hindsight his time in government looks much better than the press of the time described.
The really disappointing thing is that through that 30 years - and more before even then - I have been voting for people who put Global Warming as something that needs to be addressed; and what that has amounted to is a lot of lost elections for my votes. Understand this: my conscience on the issue of Global Warming is clear. I might have had the dubious moment where I voted for Mark Latham's ALP when he was in charge, but to be fair, he had a better policy platform on Global Warming than John Howard who poo-poo-ed the notion at that election. For all my time voting on the issue, I've got bupkis for it. Nada. The debate has remained fixed along idiotic lines with nary a policy worth shit.
It's enough to make you wonder if Democracy has failed itself. Consider the extent to which China with its authoritarian Communism with paranoid characteristics, has managed to swing towards renewables. It's a little like how Fascist governments were able to massively industrialise at the drop of the hat back in the early 1930s. It's enough to draw in some kind of approval from the rest of the world. Here we are in Australia with one of he most robust democracies in the world, and somehow we can't get our shit together to deal with Global Warming. Meanwhile there's paranoid authoritarian China doing its part to stave off the calamity. It makes you wonder about democracy itself, no? Just why is it that we somehow can't deal with the Big Picture ticket item when we put things to a vote?
The answer is of course the strident Murdoch media outlets with their hectoring, bulling, irrational hostility towards anybody who wants to do anything about it, but the big bill will be coming their way just as it will come to you and I. Murdoch with his money and influence, kept winning while I kept losing out. The way I see it, they have more houses that can't be insured ready to be burnt down by firestorms or washed away by mega-storms or just generally more crap to lose in Global Warming. So we'll see who's laughing when their part of the world goes up in smoke is or is washed away in storm waters. Me? I don't have kids who will inherit this sorry Earth ruined by rapacious capitalism and industrialisation. I don't have a house, I don't have any serious assets vulnerable to Global Warming. I might lose my car in flash floods, that's about it.
I think there should be a clause in democracy that says if you keep getting out-voted and your interests just aren't met over a prolonged period, you should be able to withhold paying taxes. I mean let's face it, I didn't vote for this shit. They did. Why the hell should I be lumped with the costs of their bad decisions?
Speaking Of Coal Mines... Who's Going To Pay For The Damages?
There's a fellow over at Extinction Rebellion who has an important post that I want to quote from. No, I didn't get his permission, but I'm sure he'd like his thoughts spread far and wide so, I imagine he'd be okay with it. Besides which I make no money here on this blog. If he wants a percentage, he can ask for whatever percentage of nothing. I'm sorry - but we're all in this together so, let's unpack this...
One of key reasons why XR is being unsuccessful is because it refuses to communicate accurately and concretely in everyday language what is going to happen in the next two decades. This can be summed up in six words: the fiscal crisis of the state. Forget dolphins, whales and icesheets – there is only one reality here and it is what the state does when it runs out of money. This has very little to do with politics or values – it’s much deeper than that. The first principle of the state is to maintain itself. And when it experiences extreme economic stress it raids society to get cash. This means it takes money from unproductive parts of the society to pay for the parts that are productive. So, for instance, in World War Two the UK government raided the assets of the rich to pay for the war. This was done by Tory MPs – it was not a matter of politics but national survival. So you know what is going happen in a decade or so when western countries are having to pay for the massive cost of electrifying their economies, retro fitting their entire housing stock, and dealing with “defence” costs of social breakdown in the sub tropics: it’s going to raid the pensions of my generation. The brutal reality is that the interests of the retired won’t matter.
And that right there should be grabbing the attention of politicians right now. If they leave Global Warming off the priority to-do list, the bill is going to come in sooner than you think, and it's going to be bigger than you think, and society is going to suffer greatly to pay that bill. So who will governments raid to pay for that bill?
Well just consider that our children and their children will have no motivation to act any differently than us. Payback time is coming. It could be merely structural. The younger generation will come to power and the logic of the state, as mentioned, will lead to the rapid impoverishment of my generation, presently in our 40’s and 50’s as we get into our 60’s and 70’s. But more likely there will be a visceral contempt: you created this shit and so you can pay for it. Polluters pay and all that. We are not heading into some ecological steady state circular economy new civilisation. Much more likely we are heading into a time when people over 60 will be spat at as they walk down the street, and be literally left to die in urine stinking death homes.
It gets very frank:
If you want to speak with some effectiveness about the actual reality of the climate crisis to the public, this is what you have to start talking about. <edit> In 2021 our governments are locking in this horrendous social stress because my generation of adults are refusing to go into civil resistance to stop it. It’s as simple as that. This is our war, but we are refusing to fight it.
Unsurprisingly this part of the talk along with the other “tell the truth” sections were taken out by the middle class liberal “let’s not upset people” regime that soon took over XR. But taking things out of talks which upset you does not stop then from happening: that is the post modernist conceit.
That much I can agree with wholeheartedly. The mere substitution of 'Climate Change' for 'Global Warming' was one of the most dishonest swicheroos pulled exactly because governments didn't want people to panic. Truth be known, Greta Thunberg is right: we all need to panic like our houses are on fire, because, they are.
If you're into scary truths - and you ought to be - you can find his lecture here:
If there's one thing the current pandemic shows us is that we're in some kind of weird hiatus from civilisation as we struggle to find a way back to business-as-usual. The very pandemic and its murky origins tells us that we've reached some limit to our economic growth, but there are the usual insane Murdoch-media-influence denials of this very simple fact.
The Coronavirus has been around for many a millennia. It has been living in the part of the ecosystem involving either bats or pangolins, which is distant to the part of the ecosystem involving homo sapiens. It is only through our unnecessary intrusion into the bat/pangolin inhabited parts of the ecosystem that has brought about this massive invasion from this virus.
The virus for its part has been involved with whatever host animal for a long time, as it seems to have evolved interesting mechanisms to bypass the immune system mammals. This is in turn limiting the effectiveness of our vaccine as the virus evolves further means to evade our immune systems. We may never know from which group this virus emerged because the communist party leadership in China will continue to resist any probe to determine its origins, but one thing is certain - we wouldn't have come across this thing if we didn't push into places we didn't need to go. We just can't be eating bat soup and pangolin pies.
And that in a nutshell of our modern global economy hitting a physical limit. Global Warming is another. If we keep on digging up fossil fuels to be burnt for energy, we will fuck up the atmosphere so much it will be like we moved to Venus. Heck, maybe there used to be Venusians. And the Venusians had their own civilisation and culture and industries and entertainment and diversions, only for it to produce too much greenhouse gasses. Maybe they even had a Venusian Murdoch Press that tried to deny it all. In any case the way Venus is today is exactly where we're headed if we don't change how we go about things with our civilisation. You can stick that into your objectivity pipe and smoke it.
It's daft to be opening up a coal mine in this part of world history.
Last week saw reports that Twiggy forrest turn over 4 billion dollars in the last financial year. I mean success is nice but what the hell is he going to do with all that money? The man's net worth is $27.2 billion. You have to wonder what the bloody hell he could spend it all on before he dies. I normally don't begrudge successful people their money. If you're Elon Musk and you somehow managed to get to the top of the heap, I doff my cap to you. Having your own space programme? Starting up an electric vehicle company? These are things I might do too if I sat on billions. But Twiggy? I really don't know what on earth he does with his time and money. In fact even his Order of Australia seems to be a product of political donations more than anything else.
A quick look at his Wikipedia page has a section on his alleged philanthropy:
"We hope to help empower individuals and families currently suffering the despair of poverty, slavery and the lack of opportunity for themselves and their children. We feel that if we all do whatever we can with whatever we have, large or small, then each of us will help make our world a more equitable and positive environment for others to thrive in."
— Andrew and Nicola Forrest, February 2013
Well that's a joke. If he's making 4 billion a year and farts around doing unspecified stuff while 'empowering' people - what does that mean anyway? - how exactly is that making the world more equitable? If you're selling coal, how the fuck are you making a positive environment in any way shape or form?
Through the influence of Scotty Black, Forrest started the GenerationOne project,[84][18] with assistance from James Packer and Kerry Stokes, who each donated A$2 million, along with the support of their respective media stations, Channel 9 and Channel 7.[85] GenerationOne and the Australian Children's Trust help to create sustainable solutions on addressing social disadvantage.[86] With Kevin Rudd, Forrest launched the Australian Employment Covenant,[86] that campaigned for businesses to hire Indigenous Australians, as they could "add value" to Australian businesses because they were "professional and reliable and wonderful" and that there is no reason for Indigenous disparity.[18][87] GenerationOne ran a series of television advertisements privately funded by Forrest, Packer and Stokes.[88] Between 2008 and 2011, Forrest obtained 253 business signatories to his covenant.[87] With Rudd, Forrest planned to employ 50,000 Aboriginal people.[89][90] As the two-year deadline approached, estimates put the number of Indigenous job placements under the scheme at around 2,800, well short of the original goal.[91]
That's pretty laughable. Maybe there aren't 50,000 Aboriginal people who want to work for people who condescend to employ them? That is sort of reached 5.6% of the target is like a damnation of the very paradigm he's waving around.
Forrest is opposed to welfare dependency for Indigenous Australians.[92] He has recounted stories of young Aboriginal girls in the Pilbara offering men sex for cigarettes. Five Indigenous women from the region to collectively lodged a complaint with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission that Forrest's comment was racist and vilified the community.[93] Forrest has been publicly accused of engaging in questionable methods of land acquisition,[94][95] and has had accusations levelled at his company for failing Indigenous trainees at FMG's vocational training centre in Port Hedland.[96]
In 2013, Forrest was chosen to lead an Australian Government review into Indigenous employment and training programs.[97] Delivered on 1 August 2014 with 27 recommendations,[98] the review proposed the creation of the Cashless Welfare Card.[99]
Well of course he's against welfare dependency - it means more taxes have to be spent on welfare if people are 'welfare dependent' and that could only mean one thing, more taxes for high earners like him. What a self-serving joke that he thinks welfare dependency is the problem.
Forrest's daughter, Grace volunteered at an orphanage in Nepal and discovered the children she had looked after had been trafficked to be sex slaves in the Middle East. This distressed Grace and motivated her father to act.[100][101] Grace, aged 21 years, said at a 2014 interfaith meeting held at the Vatican, "I feel like a puppet for hundreds of thousands of girls who are voiceless – if I can stand for them, that is what I'm here to do."[102]
Forrest established the Walk Free Foundation in 2010 to fight modern slavery.[103] In 2013 the organisation launched the Global Slavery Index ranking 162 countries "based on a combined measure of three factors: estimated prevalence of modern slavery by population, a measure of child marriage, and a measure of human trafficking in and out of a country".[104] The Index estimates there are 29 million slaves worldwide, roughly half in India and Pakistan.[101] In January 2014, Forrest announced a deal with Pakistan to do away with more than two million slaves in return for cheap coal.[105]
He traded coal for 2 million slaves! What a hero. With any luck that coal will raise the sea level and sink Pakistan... maybe? All because his daughter told him to grow a conscience. Pretty sad.
When I heard the news [that all parties had agreed to the venture] I have to admit I became emotional. This is going to change everything. This is set up like a high-achieving, measurement-driven, totally target-oriented company, it's like a hard-edged business. We are out to defeat slavery, we are not out to feel good. This is our mission. You see the complete hopelessness in the eyes [of enslaved people]. It’s like I’m stuck, I will never get help, I am dirt. Then you know that you can’t rest until you free them.
h went around meeting people with big job titles up to and including the Pope. They got together and made a declaration that slavery is bad. Jesus wept, you think the world doesn't know? How exactly is this philanthropic?
As of September 2007, Forrest had injected A$90 million into his children's charity.[83] Philanthropic activity has included gifts to his alma mater, Hale School;[107] participation in the St Vincent de Paul Society CEO sleepouts;[108] and a gift from the proceeds of the sale of 5,000 tonnes (5,500 short tons) of iron ore to the Chinese earthquake relief effort.[51] In October 2013 it was announced that Forrest was to donate A$65 million towards higher education in Western Australia. At the time the sum was believed to be the highest philanthropic donation in Australia, with most going toward funding scholarships.[109]
The Minderoo Foundation, Forrest's private foundation, was renamed as the Minderoo Group is to be expanded to include higher education contributions. The foundation has given A$270 million through the foundation since 2001.[110] In 2014, Andrew and Nicola Forrest pledged A$65 million over ten years through the Minderoo Foundation, establishing the Forrest Research Foundation to offer scholarships to students pursuing a PhD at a Western Australian university.[111][112] In 2017 Forrest donated A$400 million to medical research and social causes,[113] and in 2019 donated a further A$655 million to expand the existing work of the Minderoo Foundation in areas including cancer research, early childhood development, ocean health, and eliminating modern slavery, the largest ever living donation by any Australian philanthropist.[114]
What can I say? That's all kinds of laughable.
So my point is this: he's not doing anything useful, sensible, or valuable with his charitable works. He's just wasting his time. It would be better to just tax him and give that money to government services that need it and can do a better job. I'm not saying take his whole 4 billion. But if you took 50% and left him with 2 billion for this year, is it really going to impact his life adversely? I mean, this is the same arsehole who campaigned against the Mining Tax. He should be the one to be paying more.
