SOME LETTERS THEY DID NOT PUBLISH

17 November 2006
An Orwell election

When the urgent major issues are buried under promises (bribes) to spend money -
When everyone is urged to save water, with looming water shortages, while the State goes for population growth, to use more water, keep property prices rising and the building industry flourishing because our other industries are going under to imports.
When Public-Private-Partnerships ensure profits for the private partners while risks and subsidies are paid for by the taxpayer - rather than loan and tax methods to finance and own public works.
When the Top Tenth are paid more and more, while most ordinary people struggle with debt.
When for everything except for more and more entertainment, everyday quality of life is being made worse for ordinary people - such as increasing insecurity of jobs, small businesses and farms; unaffordable housing; traffic and transport hassles; children's loss of outdoor freedom; streetscapes wrecked by developers; wildlife and bushland disappearing, - all matters governments could do more about.
When Labor and Liberal can't tell the differences between them, in giving preferences to each other.
When the public is silly enough to follow How to Vote brazenly traded preferences instead of thinking for themselves.

8 May 2006

When 'Very rude' is 'Very adult''

Teenagers asked about 'What does the show Big Brother teach us?' made responses such as 'Very rude and very adult'. The media teach the young about what is being Adult. 'Mature Adult' ought to mean a responsible, nurturing, creative, problem-solving and thinking person, not someone obsessed by coarse language, violence and sexual voyeurism.
It would be good for the way our culture is going if ratings now labelled 'For Mature Adults' were labelled instead 'For Immature Adults', and 'For Mature Adults' meant that the programs really were for 'Mature Adults'. 'Adult shops' would also change their present meaning and products.
Does the mind boggle at a sensible idea?

NOISE obscuring voices
30 July 2006
to a radio religious program

Handicapping the handicapped

You may wonder why I take time off from all the serious battles in the world today to write to your program yet again about handicapping the elderly and hearing-impaired by background noises to speech, which is harder to hear against noise as their perception of higher frequencies deteriorates. There are several reasons. 1. It is a symbol of greater problems that are harder to fix - and yet this one would be easier.    This particular problem, of not caring for the needs of weaker minorities when it affects our own pleasure, is worse when a religious program does it.   It is like when church people in Aberdeen protested about bus-drivers having Sunday off, because then they could not take the bus to church themselves.   Not as bad as the Vatican enjoying castrati singing in their choirs though. 2. Our society is increasing other practices that discriminate against the ageing - at a time when the population is ageing.   Public transport, public broadcasting and product design are among the oppressors. 3. Music and noise backgrounds to voices in radio programs are a sign that speech itself is seen as not important itself in the messages that are being said for minds to think about.   Emotional feelings are what matter.   This again is part of a wide cultural phenomenon.   'Talks are batshit' and so must be sauced up? In public places and on TV and in films it is can be possible to lipread. Not on radio.   In singing, music and lyric complement each other in rhythm and message - although in much modern music the lyrics cannot be heard clearly and the voice is just an instrument of noise. 4. An unscientific attitude at the national broadcaster.   What experiments has the national broadcaster done to find out whether normal-hearing people can attend to messages adequately when there is clashing background, as in promotions for programs!    This is getting abominable and many people support my complaints here.

Gelding the lily is worse than gilding it.

NOISE intrusions into another excellent program - 15 June 2006

I was shocked by today's historical program .   There is increasing concern that people are becoming unable to distinguish image from reality, and fact from fiction, There is also evidence that concentration on the spoken word becomes harder with noise backgrounds, and about 15% of the population find it hard to discriminate speech when there is noise ii the background, with this proportion rising with age, as the elderly do not hear higher frequencies as well. Who are the nonages that treat this historical program as if it were fiction, to be dressed up with emotive music and noises, like an old radio drama in which coconuts are bashed to indicate a head being split? Play the whole back to yourself.   It is appallingly stupid, insensitive and unaware that what they are messing around with is a period of our history, the Cold War, that could have killed us all. and needs careful listening. The drums, kettledrums, piano music, and even a rap song were inappropriate.   There was not long ago a program that included a concentration camp - treated in the same way Shakespeare's Hamlet described how Ophelia behaved like those musicians. I think the reason must be that broadcasting staff are bored with what they are doing and so they want to play around, regardless of the subject and regardless of the listeners. It is far better to put on as good a spoken broadcast as you can - and what I could hear of it was very good. You could save money too without 'original music' and sound engineers playing around.   Surely SB could do something else.   Perhaps give him five minutes by himself saying "This is what SB thought of this program." Then he could play piano and drums and clash as much as he liked, for five minutes. Looking at the world you can see how much is happening because people cannot tell what is real and what fits the fictions they have got used to in computer games, soaps and other entertainment.

regards

Trading in water rights

Trading in water rights is not about saving water but allows its effective privatization out of government control and into the hands of corporations, banks and speculators.

Water supplies are essential to the defence as well as the prosperity of Australia. Monsanto is interested in acquiring privatised water supplies all over the world, and it is becomiing harder to keep out foreign ownerships, following our trade agreements, especially with USA. There will be inevitable lawsuits, even international ones, so lawyers will benefit. Regulation will become a nightmare.

The future of the Murray-Darling Basin will become more hopeless if corporate agribusiness, with their short-term need for shareholder profits, control the use of water. A hundred years ago our Victorian forefathers with world-first foresight legislated to keep water and water frontages in public ownership. Both Federal and State governments today must act promptly to ensure continued public ownership of water supplies for coordinated regulation and development. That way can ensure the benefits of the highest value use of water, with long-term viability, as free trading in water rights cannot.

A free market in consumer goods can (though not always) ensure that buyers can choose what they want from among different products or services. Water is not a matter of choices.
A free market in water means that whoever can pay the most gets the product. Speculation takes its rip-off. Public benefit and the overall health of our agricultural economy are overruled.

A published response to an editorial 'Enjoyment with commonsense and responsibility' that only wowsers would want to limit more than six alcohol outlets in the Royal Botanic Gardens - 30 July 2006.

August 16 2005.

Sex differences in Applied Intelligence

Despite measured IQ rising world-wide, looking at the present state of the world and human contributions to it, it is worth investigating the gender differences in how IQ is manifested in male and female behaviour. Check the sweeping generalisation that men are more likely to be stupid and women more likely to be silly, in the sorts of damage they perpetrate. Is Original Stupidity something we should admit as more serious than Original Sin? While the organizations and projects we set up become greater and still more global, our Original Stupidity may remain too great too manage them.

When 'funny grotesque' is dangerous - 29 July 2006
and Population

Psychologists know how easily desensitisation to cruelty occurs, and how prior imagination opens the way to how we act for good or ill under pressure ('Funny grotesque', a column by Charlie Brooker, July 27).   It is hard to stop the cruelty in the world entering into your soul and your own imagination, but it must be resisted. For one thing, it takes the space needed to imagine peace, when hardly anyone can. (Of all the fantasy solutions to the Middle East I can think of, only two are pleasant.) With all the real unbearable cruelty in the world, how can Charlie Brooker, make up to me for adding the unbearable image of crucified pigs as 'funny grotesque'?  Consider, part of the bestseller appeal of The Da Vinci Code is its sadistic imagery.

The other dangerous reaction to apparently insoluble problems is shuteye.   Why cannot the media dare to include figures of population growth in reports of troubled states, with all the drivers to increase it further? The following trouble-spots reported in the same issue of the Guardian all have extreme problems exacerbated by population pressure   -

The Gaza Strip, population 243,000   in 1950, now over 1 million and heading for 4 million by 2000 (catastrophes excepted) compared with Israel, 1 million in 1950, now 5 million, heading for 8 millionAfghanistan, 8 million to 23 million to 81 million
Brazil, 54 million to 175 million to 228 million
Congo,   (Kinshasa) 13 million to 52 million to 183 million
Ghana, 5 million to 19 million to 39 million
Haiti, 3 million to 7 million to 18 million
India, 369 million to 1 billion to 1 billion 600 million
Iran, 16 million to 65 million to 89 million
Iraq, 5 million to 22 million to 56 million
Ivory Coast, 2 million to 29 million to 64 million
Liberia, 800,000 to 2 million to 7 million.  
Mexico, 28 million to 99 million to 147 million
Pakistan, 39 million to 146 million to 294 million
And is UK getting crowded? 50 million to 59 million to 63 million - the increase disproportionately in southern England.
(Data from the International Data Base of the US Census Bureau 2005)

Courage in facing facts would be better 'future-proofing' than 'thinking of the worst things in the world, then laugh at them', because these worst things are still not beyond trying to do something about.

An eye for an eye in Gaza - July 2006

One of the greatest Jewish contributions to civilisation was the law of 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' (Exodus, 21.24). This has often been criticised as a vengeful law in contrast with the Christian update of 'Love your enemy, and do good to them that hate you' (and see Matthew 5:38-9), but in fact it prevented excessive vengeance, with its escalation of hatreds. What would happen if this Jewish law was applied in Israeli-Palestine relations today? (Or if Christian nations considered Christian teaching?)

TV Entertainment and alternatives to censorship - 7 July 2006 - Racing to the bottom -

The democratic dilemma about literally in-your-face sexual romping on the TV show Big Brother was put to me by an early manager of a TV station when TV was new. He explained that he had to axe a popular children's science show because a competitor was taking the ratings with B- Westerns, so he had to rival that.   In the 1930s the coming of television had beenwelcomed as the way to bring knowledge and peace to the whole world.             We take for granted that most people are not influenced by what they see. Most people do not buy from ads with no case for their products, or copy the language of the soaps, seek to emulate the celebs, watch porn in order to be turned on, copycat criminal methods, or, because they see it on TV, feel encouraged to hit women, smoke, drink hard, drive fast or cheat. We reassure ourselves that most children who watch TV do not learn from it.  Nevertheless, a significant proportion of people and children do learn, as can be observed.   This hurts us all. Could artists and producers be clever and visionary enough to help them learn how to live ways possibly less entertaining on television but less likely to cause depression and relationship breakups in real life? This is the real alternative to censorship.   How could Big Brother contestants compete in solving real life problems,   using their creative imaginations?   Young people could learn from TV about loving and making love, rather than that girls should accept being rough-housed and being the underlings in implied or actual oral sex.

Our migrants could learn better things to copy in Australian culture than they do at present.

Alternatives to pokies   2nd March 2006

Something is wrong if people will drive to another town if their town does not have pokies. They need to have more exciting and interesting things in their lives, and addictions that are less wasteful. Perhaps a newspaper could take this up, and collect recommendations for other ways that adults can have thrills, surprises, social togetherness, play with machines that make noises, escape their troubles, and have unexpected treats.  
Banks could make it possible for poorer people to save their money and gain interest, tobecome richer.   They could have regular lucky bonanzas for small savers, like UK=92s premium bonds.We could look for other ways for the State to be financed, so it no longer has an interest in supporting a social problem. Gambling owners claimed in 1998 that 69% of players play for entertainment and do not expect to win. Test that claim; have no payouts at all. Then see who will pay to play gambling games, which games, and how much they will pay, when there are no prizes. The gambling instinct is vital to our survival -   to be willing totake risks.   It is a shame that it is perverted so that people just lose their money.

If only millionaires gambled on ways to improve the country.

Societies corrupt, and Societies honest - To a National Broadcaster, July 2006

Please can you now have a program on the delights of honesty and being honorable, and the pursuit of truth? It is so pleasant to live in a society that is basically honest as ours still largely is, rather than one that is largely corrupt, that I react with horror at every push to make Australians less honest than they are.     In your program about Telling Lies you kept saying 'we' as if everyone did it, about behavior that fortunately is not yet universal in Australia.   You know that people copy what they think everyone else does.   You are an opinion and behavior shaper. Western civilisation and the way our modern society works developed in part because 80% of the people tried to be honest 80% of the time, so that the cheats were a minority.   Religious values were that lying was a sin and smirched the soul, and social values were about honesty, honour, self-respect, integrity and decency. Science and the pursuit of knowledge are driven by a desire to find the truth. Religious people prospered in business because people could trust them. The desire to be honest and truthful is important, to keep trust and honest endeavour going in our society. Even if all of us lapse, it should be a matter of shame and regret. (Remember the story of the clergyman who came across fellers having a bet on who could tell the biggest lie.   " Why, I have never told a lie in my life, " says the clergyman.   " Give him the prize, Bill ," shout the boys.) You don't need lies to make life interesting.   You only need curiosity, interest iin other, imagination, and action.   I was brought up in an extended Methodist family that was keen on telling the truth and it made life easier and more comfortable to be able to trust everyone.   Most lies are quite unnecessary.   It is possible to say the truth, or avoid lies.   People should never lie to their children. (Have a Life Matters program on that?)   As a clinical child psychologist I have seen the damage when parents habitually lie and take it for granted that they lie.
Father Christmas?   When they asked about him, we told our children he was a pretend and they needn't have it if they didn't want it, They always cried, " We like the pretend! " and joined in.
' Can we go to the circus ?'   Never promise unless you can certainly keep it.
' Do you like my dress ?'   'I like your red one better.'
Where do babies come from ? " You'll know more about this as you grow older, but basically, ." (and then at the level a child can understand)
Why does Uncle Joe do that ? " I wish he wouldn't ."
Why? The eternal questioning of children trying to make conversation. Answer as you can, including, ' Let's try to find answers later . . ' ' Can we come out to see you ?' ask unwanted acquaintances.   Well, let them, it might be better than you think.   "Well, we do have an hour free at . ."

It's better to try to avoid lying than to give in.   Be true to yourself, even down to your CV.   The problem of hypocrites is because that is 'the tribute that vice pays to virtue', but they are shown up when others keep their word.

23 March 2005 - Making a city more - or less - liveable

18 Ways in which the City of Melbourne is being made more livable.

Made more livable for the well-heeled, with large and opulent homes and unearned income from properties.
Lots of restaurants, concerts, creative arts
More civic money spent on celebrations, fireworks etc (I am agin this waste)
Asian tourists remark on the cleanliness
Graffiti are getting better - and I hope the best will be encouraged for the Olympic Games
More spectator sport facilities. Um.
People are friendly. Many suburbs (most?) people have friendly neighbors.
City streets pretty safe.
More psychiatric problems and homeless and domestic violence
Remarkably good doctors in hospital, especially pediatricians
Variety of cultures
More bike-tracks
less public drunkenness
People are allowed to save roofwater with tanks, once forbidden.
Docklands and Southbank are far more attractive and 'livable' than they once were.
The Yarra river used more as an asset
Lots of Potter , everywhere a Potter, everywhere you go something delightful and useful has been funded by the Sir Ian Potter Foundation.
Many local areas have community spirit and are still game to protest.

56 ways in which Melbourne is being made less livable -

mainly through size beyond its 'natural size'. but also because the driving political force (as expressed to me by a government MP) is that since manufactures are gong down, then wealth has to come from the building industry and property prices because growth has to keep going.

Taking up more and more good agricultural land for housing - and Australia is short of good agricultural land. they should be building on the least fertile soils.
Differences between the rich and the poor getting worse in schools as well as in suburbs. Trashville contrasts with Brighton. (We should have Shame-Tours)
Smog so that Melbourne at night has an orange miasma. Seen from a mountain the smog can look awful.
VCAT is a great force against saving civic amenities.
Pollution. Crowding. Transport Minister Batchelor says we 'have to get used to' transport congestion and transport problems.
More heritage value quality well-built homes destroyed
Federation square unfriendly to women, children, wheelchairs and baldy signed.
Stupid pricing of public transport, including country
More feral problems from foxes, rats, possums and crows.
Inefficient government departments in education and public transport
More waste especially of building materials and food
No emergency planning for any oil shortage.
Government - far more spin and government employees and contractors not really knowing what they want to do.
Healthy weather, stimulating, can do without air conditioning and central heating if the worst comes to the worst and your homes are sensible but recently more extremes.
Too much junk mail wasting trees.
Residents keep getting lives made worse by developments they are supposed to put up with -why? Views being spoiled, traffic worse as space made denser.
New estates are pretty awful, including weird street layouts to confuse everyone, and lack of public transport ane amenities.
Small shops having a worse time, including small shops dictated to by the owners of shopping malls.
More people living further from their work.
More insecure and even useless jobs.
Less care for psychiatric patients, and more forces to make people less mentally healthy.
Quality of child-care is not as good - private profit is not a good motive.
University life has gone to pot for students - they just go there for lectures, not for the best years of their educational life.
Ghettoes starting u with ghetto schools, whereas previously there have been areas of ethnic specialisation, but well influencing everyone else, eg Springvale, Victoria ST, Lygon St
Muzak in public places.
Loss of graceful beauty in buildings. New buildings usually ugly and fragmented.
Offices less pleasant to work in for the sake of economy in running them.
Hospitals more strained and recuperation times sometimes cut so much that readmissions result.
More people with less motivation because they take recreational drugs.
Victoria Market under constant threat.
The barbaric doing over of what was a beautiful and convenient Central Station in order to fill more spaces up with shops.
Worse seating for bus-shelters and the like.
Fewer facilities for children to run free and allowed to be out in the streets
Homes less suitable for children, including space for fresh air play.
More public land passed over to developers to make profits.
Environmental criteria for building cuts out at 5 stars not ten stars so a lot of shoddy and not really environmental buildings are approved and falsely look like the top.
Greater distance from shops as small shops go under
Greater distance from schools
Greater distances between tram stops as Yarra Trams policy cuts stops
The wonderful view of Melbourne from across Princes Bridge when Gas and Fuel was pulled down was only temporary - now spoiled by Federation Square which will soon look tatty.
Uglier municipal public spaces with monoculture deserts with single plantings of ugly plants where there used to be gardens.
No railway to Tullamarine though the road is getting more crowded.
More people spending more time of their lives commuting.
Fewer people and children able to play sports while more are just watching.
Taking longer to get to the bush or the 'unspoiled beach'.
More ruthless tree pruning in streets for the sake of cars
A nasty promotion of road ragers, domestic ragers, ragers against welfare workers, doctors, nurses and other public servants,
Higher property prices so most families cannot buy homes
What once was the green belt is now green wedges and they are wedges that are getting thinner and thinner.
Logging in Melbourne's catchments so the water quality will get worse.
Still pretty stuffy about innovations.
Ideal city used to be 250,000
Sculptures more machines and rough technique
Flinders Street concourse not passenger frendly.
The critical mass for attracting genius and sparking it off is wonderful individuals - as well as patrons with money. Yet Melbourne does tend to squash lively individuals and lively talk about things that can be done.
Huge liability insurance and fear of litigation has stopped many good things and prevents many others.