Being in hospital may well be dangerous, but ignoring climate change is even more dangerous

"Being admitted to hospital is equally dangerous as driving,” Peter Ryan recently told those at a U3A session in Shepparton.

The chairman of the Board of Directors at Goulburn Valley Health was discussing the $168.5 million redevelopments at the Shepparton institution when he mentioned the health threats implicit with a stay in hospital, not only Shepparton.

Coincidently, Chairman Ryan’s comments came about the same time the Melbourne-based Climate and Health Alliance (CAHA) had released its National Strategy for Climate Health and Wellbeing.

In a letter to the Health Minister Susan Ley, the CAHA said: “We write to you, as health and medical professionals, out of concern for the health and wellbeing

impacts that climate change is having on the Australian community and to encourage you to help lead the development of a national strategic response to the health impacts of climate change.”

Further, and almost serendipitously,  a recorded piece from the University of Melbourne’s public health specialist, Professor Mark Stevenson, appeared in my inbox.

He was discussing the need to prioritize physical well-being in our urban planning  to achieve better human health outcomes through emphasizing active transport modes like cycling and walking while discouraging dependence on cars.

Mr. Ryan told the U3A session that being personally an active cyclist he would ensure cycling facilities were prominent at the refurbished hospital reinforcing, unknowingly, the professor’s message.

The importance of the Shepparton-based GV Health to the city and the greater Goulburn Valley cannot be overstated, nor can its fragility because of the infrastructure on which it depends is more likely to fail when under pressure from rising temperatures.

The state’s power system can, and does fail, particularly when the heat soars, and to counter that the hospital has installed a diesel-powered electrical backup system.

Atmospheric scientist, Professor
David Karoly from
the University of Melbourne.

However, that system has its limitations and would not be equal to powering the hospital through several days with temperatures beyond 50 degrees Celsius.

Is that fanciful thinking? Well, not according to University of Melbourne atmospheric scientist, Professor David Karoly, who several months ago warned that a well prepared Shepparton needed to be ready for heatwaves of that magnitude.

And so while we need to embrace these planned changes and improvements to the city’s hospital, we also need to think seriously about what we can do personally and as a community to help abate those difficulties cited by Professor Karoly.

Yes, the climate is changing. Yes, it’s bringing changes to our weather system unhelpful to our health, personally and more generally. Yes, those changes are human-induced and there is is no comfort to be drawn from those who deny what is happening.

And yes, as Mr. Ryan says spending time in the hospital, any hospital, may well be inherently dangerous, but our failure to positively respond to climate change increases that danger by an incomprehensible factor.

Sheppartonians demonstrate generosity, acceptance, and kindness

Australians have long been generous hosts.

And the Goulburn Valley is unquestionably one of the better examples of that societal generosity, acceptance, and kindness.

It has not always been smooth sailing, however, but since the gold rush days, Shepparton and the greater Goulburn Valley has been the destination of many immigrants.

What brought them here then and still does today?

Well, many things, among them agricultural and commercial prospects, a perceived social cohesion and opportunities and, importantly, that chance to belong.

And if the City of Greater Shepparton can lay claim to anything, it has become a place in which people can “belong”; something that is probably the greatest of all human needs for it is important to feel as if we belong to something, someone or somewhere.

Modern Shepparton is a concoction of cultures and beyond the occasional minor disturbance, they all live comfortably together, each enriching the other as they willingly share and dip into hitherto unknown ways of living.

What is visible here in Shepparton leads only to a mystery as to why many people are uncomfortable with the idea of sharing their space with others whom they perceive as different from them.

Those who imagine themselves as “local” should be thrilled that others want to come here as it is clearly understood that people want to migrate to places where they see good resources such as healthcare, education, stability, order and a community ready to address environmental matters such as climate change.

Shepparton has traditionally been good all those matters with the exception of the latter, which has emerged as the most important and will stress all the former.

Just a fews days ago several people, among them GPs and other academics and a couple of “ordinary” people, gathered at the University of Melbourne’s Nossal Institute for Global Health to discuss “Climate change, conflict, and migration” not with the idea of reaching any conclusion, but to better understand the dynamic.

Greater Shepparton in north eastern
Victoria is home for many and the
destination for even more.

Discussion centred on a paper from a New York university suggesting that uncertainty about the future was one of the most crucial factors that can lead to violent conflict, and in some ways perceived insecurity is more critical than actual insecurity. The Goulburn Valley delivers that much sought after sense of security.

The paper said: “As such, even if in reality migrants do not pose a significant threat to political or economic power, the perceived risk may be enough to provoke conflict.”

Shepparton’s long history of being the preferred destination for people seeking to put down new roots has manifested a sense of tolerance and understanding that is credit to the wider community.

The New York paper says: “Climate change is one of the most significant threats that mankind will need to address in the coming decades, and the potential impacts of climate variability and change on migration and conflict will remain an important area of research and policy planning.”

The challenge for all of us here in the Goulburn Valley will be to deepen our tolerance and broaden our understanding as climate disruption worsens and subsequently the inflow of new people increases.

Turning to sortition to elect our representatives

Maybe we should draw names from a hat to decide who should represent us on the Greater Shepparton City Council?

And that “hat” would be big enough to hold the names of all the city’s ratepayers and from that would come the nine people who would be our city councillors.

The idea that we should use what is really a lottery to choose our city councillors would be as equally effective as voting for our preferred person.

Should you question or doubt such an idea, and you may well be correct, but often reason is worse than useless and sometimes the most rational choice is little more than a random stab in the dark.

Michael Schulson, an American freelance writer, who covers science, religion, technology, and ethics recently wrote in Aeon magazine about “sortition” saying that someone, somewhere, or something is always playing dice.

Sortition (the random choice for anything) is not new as it was practiced by the Athenians in ancient Greece to choose those in charge of governing committees; magistrates, a role they could not hold more than once in their life, putting paid to career politicians.

Of course, the field in those times had been narrowed somewhat as you needed to be a property owner and male, two things that would not and should not be among the criteria today.

Of course, sortation is alive and well in our society today and it brings with it responsibilities far in excess of whatever you might encounter as a city councillor – using what in effect is a lottery system we appoint people to juries and hand them the power to infringe on the life of another, even to the extent of sending them to gaol.

A cursory glance at history illustrates that even rational and reasoned choices can go horribly wrong; the values of some elected are often not what they seem, and because of their actions people can die and society can pay an alarming cost, both economically, structurally,  and emotionally.

Shifting to a dice-like decision-making process might seem objectionable to many, but surely anyone prepared to have an honest and objective look at what exists and brings people to power who are loaded with obligations to causes and ideologies that are frequently foreign to the common good, must admit that what we have is really oligarchy rather than democracy.

Sortition or election by lottery, would not be without its problems, but who could argue that what exists is problem-free.

Writing on the ABC’s The Drum, Ian Dunlop said: “What if all the stuff we complain about in regard to our politicians - that they are unrepresentative, that they are out of touch, that they are in the pocket of various vested interests, that all they are really interested in is getting re-elected - what if all those problems are actually a by-product of voting itself?”

He referred to Belgian historian, David Van Reybrouck, the founder of the G1000 Citizens' Summit, who doesn't want to get rid of voting altogether, but does want us to think about other ways of deciding who governs us.

Reybrouck, he wrote, wants to replace traditional democratic voting with a combination of voting and sortition. That is the drawing of lots.

And so rather than voting in October for whoever we want on the council, maybe we should just cast our lot in with luck – it’s simpler, cheaper, and in nearly all instances, more effective and doesn’t bring with it personal and ideological baggage.

Privacy is a perculiar, and archaic thing

Privacy is a peculiar thing and a longing for it is somewhat archaic and something of an ill-fit in this modern world.

In this quickly emerging connected world, the “internet of everything” through which most everything we do, from shopping, work, travel, and leisure, will be facilitated electronically, privacy will eventually be a disadvantage.

Privacy is subjective with some seeing it as the root of their wellbeing, while others at the extremes of the arc, care naught for what others know or care about them.

And so it is into this malaise of confusion about privacy that Australian Bureau of Statistics have waded, or it is plunged? with its first online census.

It seems that allowing people to complete the census online is not the issue rather that they must not only provide the usual census information but also add their name, age, and address.

The bureau has guaranteed security arguing it will separate those personal details immediately, “anonymizing” the information as it arrives.

However, it notes that the separated off identifying data will be used by the government to better understand the Australian population and so plan for its wants and needs.

Several years ago a CEO of a leading computer company said even then that privacy was a thing of the past and today it is being argued that if we want (and it is not going to be “want” for we will have no choice) to access what is being touted as the “new economy”, then the first thing to go will be our privacy.

Of course, what do we call “privacy” – my life is fairly public, but yet there is  a host of things in my life, about which people know nothing or little, and nor would they care or be interested, I suspect.

The Australian Privacy Foundation defends the right of individuals to control their personal information and to be free of excessive intrusions.

The Australian foundation is aligned with “Privacy International”, a body that investigates the secret world of government surveillance and exposes the companies enabling it.

Privacy as an idea painted by at least these two groups appears as a bulwark against conspiracies by government and corporations designed to entangle people and strip them of their rights.

History illustrates that both governments and corporations have invaded peoples’ privacy, and will again, but looked at objectively and considered in isolation, tomorrow’s census is not something to be feared, rather embraced.

Public is the antithesis of private, but if we are to avoid the travails of exponential population growth and the associated despoliation of our environment, then public must have priority and that probably needs compromises on perceived privacies.

History illustrates, interestingly, that many of the good things in life, including here in the Goulburn Valley, can be traced directly to public participation.

Predicting the future - only brave people or fools need apply

Only a brave person or a fool dares predict the future, or so the adage suggests.

Ben McLeish.

Bravery as commonly understood has not been a noted personal quality and as foolishness is subjective, that decision rests with you.

Goulburn Valley voters opted on July 2 for what they saw as security ahead of bravery and eschewed foolishness preferring imagined good sense and predictability.

Any useful attempt to address the future demands bravery and a targeted foolishness, both being the antithesis of the nostalgia and ache for the warmth of what is known and familiar as was illustrated by electors in the seat of Murray.

The Goulburn Valley has clearly profited from its adherence to conservative values, but no longer can we shield ourselves from the future by grasping at what was.

Our shift to the future will not be easy as it requires what Ben McLeish says is a “mass cognitive shift.”

McLeish, a primary organizer of Britain’s Zeitgeist Movement and a student of English, Literary and Cultural Theory who graduated from the University of Warick, said, writing in “Anticipating 2025”: “Without a basic recognition of our fundamental misalignment with nature, we cannot begin to harvest the great benefits that a decentralized, truly participatory organizational model can afford; what has been termed as a Natural-law/Resource-based economy.” 

The same book quoted the late economist John Meynard Keynes who said: “The idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behaviour that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice.”

So considering what McLeish and Meynard Keynes say and to free ourselves of the conservatism that appears to have opened the door to a Canberra office for Damian Drum and condemns us to what once worked, but which will be wholly inappropriate as a decidedly different tomorrow rolls around, we need to resculpt our values and behaviours.

Little, beyond the laws of physics, will be the same as the decades roll by; our education system is busy training people for jobs that soon won’t exist; the “Internet of Everything” will impact our daily lives from health to energy consumption and shopping to life expectancy, and give us artificial intelligence.

Australia's PM, Malcolm Turnbull -
his plan for 'jobs and growth' could
be innovated our of existence.

This is not your colloquial “cross-roads”; rather, this is a blind canyon from which the only escape hinges on innovation, but not of the sort espoused in recent weeks by Malcolm Turnbull who focussed on only “jobs and growth”.

Most everything with which we are familiar – human movement (transport), health, insurance, manufacturing, education, work, agriculture, currencies, shopping, leisure, and property – will be subject to and changed by innovation.

And, in fact, the jobs and growth envisaged by our PM will be largely innovated out of existence.

 

To the conservatives such a future appears dystopian; to the brave, it is exciting, but our damaged climate, a product of the innovation of the type sought by our PM,  promises a future in which fresh thinking will be about understanding, adapting to changed circumstances, and to mitigating our carbon dioxide emissions, and so slowing climate change

Considering Seneca's advice and avoiding the road to rapid ruin

Good advice can frequently be found in the past and it was a Roman philosopher who knew nought about today’s challenges but to whom we ought to be listening.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger, talked about how slowly things came into being and yet how quickly they could dissipate.

He said: "It would be some consolation for the feebleness of ourselves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."

Here in the Goulburn Valley, we have had our shoulders to the wheel for nearly two centuries creating what was to become one of Australia’s richest food bowls, seeing off many threats and being equal to countless challenges, but a largely unseen and misunderstood difficulty lurks in the shadows.

Seneca the Younger talked of “sluggish growth” and warned of “rapid ruin” and now after near 200 years of growth driven by energy unleashed from fossil fuels, we face the latter.

Interestingly, those who built this fertile place, face a never before encountered nexus with the refuse from the fossil fuels that has accumulated in the atmosphere threatening rapid ruin.

A 10 000 year “Goldilocks” era, highlighted by an Industrial Revolution ignited by the liberation of energy from fossil fuels, opened the door to utopian times which are now quickly becoming dystopian.

Earth, the only planet we have, is more than four billion years old and if reduced to 24 hours, humans have been here for maybe three seconds and so in about a tenth of a second we have trashed the place, in that we are behaving like a bunch of pleasure seekers at an out of control house party.

At this point, it’s probably worth considering the question asked by Italian professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence, Ugo Bardi, who wondered if we have reached the limits of human intelligence?

Now there is a question and the sentiment it implies that will undoubtedly rile many, but considered objectively, the professor has grounds for his argument for even a cursory look around the world illustrates that even the simplest of things, that cost nothing, such as kindness, friendliness, sharing and collaboration are in short supply.

Measured on the aforementioned 24-hour time scale we have only tenths of a second left to make wholesale changes to our lives, shifting from our energy-rich, accumulative, individualistic and ego-driven ways epitomized by our existing market-driven economy.

Modernity, certainly for most Australians, is attractive, but to lean on a political mantra from the early 70s, “It’s time” to challenge the market myths and in putting people before profit, willingly forego some of those promised pleasures and work to build resilience in your community and help slow Seneca’s “rapid ruin”.
 

Baffling us with bluster and 'Econobabble'

"Econobabble" by
Richard Denniss.

“Econobabble” caught my attention about the time Malcolm Turnbull orchestrated the July 2 Federal Election.

The PM announced election date earlier this month and we have been subjected to exactly that ever since.

A friend, Juris, and the father of Peter Greste (who began his journalism career in Shepparton) recommended the Richard Denniss book.

Juris has had a life-long interest in urban design and through that has developed a keen sense of the sensibilities of what it is the makes life better and how the inappropriate language can easily corrupt understanding.

“Econobabble” is about exactly that as it is the verbal sleight-of-hand used to make what should be simple, almost unintelligible and impenetrable to most people, and to give it a sense of sophistication and importance.

Most seeking election, from our PM down, talk as if the economy is a science (it’s not), something that only an elite in-group can appreciate and understand and so it is best left to those who pull the financial levers, or that is the implication.

Words like “surplus”, “deficit”, “deregulation”, “profits” and terms such as “market forces”, “terms of trade”, “invisible hand”, “red tape”,  and “nanny state”, “live within our means” are frequently thrust into discussions to both confuse listeners and portray a sense of knowledge; knowledge advocated with such confidence that it’s unquestionably correct and beyond challenge. That is “Econobabble” in full flight.

Unlike science that is based on measurable and identifiable facts, the economy is little more than opinion, but being at the heart of modernity it inevitably, and quickly becomes the province of he or she with the loudest voice, the most charisma and so the most influence.

The recently signed Tran-Pacific Partnership is the pinnacle of “Econobabble" as it took more than 1000 pages of text to explain what Denniss says could be summed up in one line – “There will be no restrictions on trade between Australia and the United States”.

Rhetoric is remote from the restraints of physics, but in economics, anyone can float any idea they like (Australia’s Treasurer doesn’t need any economic qualifications to hold the nation’s purse strings) and so inevitably conversations about money quickly become “Econobabble”.

It is disturbing that the health of our economy and the broader health of Australian society are interrelated is an idea that has become entrenched in the national conversation.

Australia is, or close to the richest nation on Earth and yet even a cursory look shows that many people live in poverty, many are homeless, many live precarious lives, healthcare is not universally available or equitable in any sense, education is becoming polarized between the rich and the rest, and the essence of our society is being skewed to emphasize the individual at the expense of our communities.

Australia may well be economically rich, but it is socially poor as the innovation and drive that has long enriched the country has morphed and solidified into a way of life that favours a relative few and leaves the rest scrambling for the scraps.

Denniss argues we should never acquiesce when confronted by apparently knowledgeable and authoritative people, rather we should question their every comment, and be aware of confirmation bias (agreeing with something simply because it supports existing beliefs).

We should ready ourselves for what will be another month or so of “Econobabble”.

The Turnbull budget will not have just the imagined impacts

People from around here will feel the impact of the recent Federal Budget, but not necessarily only in the way they imagine.

My shoulders drooped as I listened to the oft-repeated mantra of “jobs and growth” as I sensed many here would be warming up to join the chorus seemingly unaware that “less” is what we need, not “more”.

In a world seriously troubled by human-induced climate disruption, policies and budgets based on 20^th Century values and ideas will simply not work.

Rather than look back for solutions and employ ideas offensive to the planet, Mr Turnbull, and his cohort need to lift their gaze and see that the unfolding world of the 21^st Century will be strikingly different and instead of the much-cited and inappropriate exhortation for jobs and growth, our leaders should be helping create and build a community able to thrive in an energy constrained future.

Such an idea undoubtedly doesn’t fit with the ideologies of either of Australia’s major political parties with both pandering to the populist ideas and values that have hardened since the Industrial Revolution to become an entrenched societal practice.

Living here in the Goulburn Valley doesn’t provide us with any protection from climate change for the south-east corner of Australia is experiencing changes to both weather and seasons, just as is the case around the world.

With the ideologically trapped Federal Government turning its back on climate science and our State Government doing something but treading carefully for fear of breaching its limited mandate, the responsibility to actually do something now falls upon the City of Greater Shepparton.

That would not be unusual, for while many national governments hesitate and procrastinate, and state bodies call for yet another report, many cities have taken up the dropped batten and have introduced projects and ideas into their respective Local Government areas that will lead to resilience and sustainability, and along with that play their part in the wider reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.

Malcolm Turnbull needs to thinking
innovatively about tomorrow.

And so what do we do?

Let’s begin with the city’s transport strategy, which presents us with a wonderful opportunity to think deeply and seriously about what the Shepparton of tomorrow should look like, how it should work and how the people who live here should move about.

Yes, a wonderful opportunity, one which is either the moment when we decide to create a city able to cope with the climate disrupted future or opt for the status quo and wander aimlessly down the same endless and, as time will show a rather rough road.

Courageous decisions will see a city that prioritizes and is friendly to pedestrians; encourages cyclists in the same way; introduces electric (solar charged) transit; and produces reasons about our need for sophisticated inter-town public transport (trains, light or otherwise) that eclipse any contra-arguments put by our State or Federal Governments.

Idealistic? Yes, but if we are to find our way through the troubled times ahead, it is essential we think differently and escape from the fossilized ideas of the current Federal Budget, presented as an “economic plan for the future”.

Take a deep breath, dear reader and look for the cause, rather than at the symptoms

Take a deep breath, dear reader – rather than piecemeal, band-aid handouts from our governments, State or Federal, aimed at the symptoms of society’s ills, we need to look at and treat the cause.

Those symptoms of troubles in our communities are easy to spot, but the cause of those ills are frequently hidden within and behind political and corporate propaganda and populist views that avoid facts and are founded on little more than emotive puffery.

As suggested, take a deep breath for we have been duped, and the world’s prevailing economic system favours only about 60 people, who between them control more wealth than nearly half the world’s population.

While that 60 or so wallow in their wealth, there are billions who live in either poverty, just scrape by or are of the “precariat” class; that is they live precarious lives as they are uncertain of their work, food and housing.

The call by Murry electorate National Party candidate for the forthcoming Federal Election, Damian Drum, for government money to address the illicit drug ice, that he has described as “the most addictive drug ever”, may well be seen as sensible and honourable, but it is little more than another band-aid on a deeper social malaise.

(As an aside, Mr Drum really needs to look more closely at the facts as the legal and socially acceptable drug, alcohol is vastly more costly to society, both through damage to individuals, emotional and physical, and in costs to our health system, law enforcement and work absenteeism, and so rather than worry about ice, Mr Drum should focus on taming  our alcohol addiction).

So, be it alcohol or an illicit drug, they are little more than symptoms of an economic system favoured and encouraged by a handful, embraced by billions who believe there is no other way, and yet it is a process that teeters on collapse, and survives only because of public largesse.

What is going on here?

The world’s prevailing economic system, capitalism, thrived in the 20^th Century, particularly post-World-War-Two when energy was abundant and cheap and innovation, in a siren-like way, led us through what was to become known as the “great acceleration” when everything seemed possible and the only limit was our imagination.

However, the capitalism that solidified during that era as the pre-eminent economic system is broken and the technology that expanded and enhanced our post-WWII experiences advances appears poised to implode.

Thinker and author, Jeremy Rifkin, recently said that we are now living with the “internet of everything”, and this digital technological advance is such that it has eroded the marginal cost of most goods, and as such is like a dagger to the heart of capitalism.

And American author, former professor of the Harvard Business School, political activist, prominent critic of corporate globalization, David C. Korten said, “We need an economy that values life—not money—and safeguards a living Earth.”

Yes, capitalism is slowly crumbling for it has reached the end of its useful life and rather than lament its demise; a demise that will signal the end of distasteful economic inequality and inequity that has plagued at least half the world’s population; we need to sort through and settle on a governance process that is about sharing, collaboration, decency, equality in every sense, and, importantly, will enable humanity to understand and stand shoulder-to-shoulder as it addresses the unfolding difficulties of a human-disrupted climate system.

Much said about 'riots', now it's time to really think about why they happened

Most of us have heard, read or seen stories about the recent Melbourne Moomba Federation Square “riots”.

One of the hazy images taken during the
the so-called "Federation Square riots".

Some immediate reactions about how we should discipline those who crossed certain social mores are as inappropriate as the behaviour of those so-called “rioters”.

Before rushing forward to damn participants, we need to step back, and think for a moment, and in drawing what some might believe is a long-bow, consider it was generally the broader behaviour of our society that contrived to create those events upon which many have frowned.

“Impossible” I hear many readers muttering.

Society has failed when its narrow focus measures a person’s success and usefulness to their respective communities on a scale that many thinkers see as antithetical to the broader health of the planet and humanity generally.

What we saw at Federation Square was little more than a few voiceless people who ruffled the edges of what is considered normal to illustrate, as best they could, that the workings of society favour only a few and disillusion and disempower the rest.

Does Shepparton have an equal? Of course, but not yet apparent or of the scale witnessed recently in Melbourne.

A glance at Shepparton’s statistics will illustrate discontent among a raft of people; people unable to find their place in our community; people disengaged from education, work and who live without a sense of belonging; they live with a sense of disconnect, a sense they are not a part of our community.

The Melbourne ”rioters” and Shepparton’s disenfranchised need to be included, embraced for nothing alienates a person faster or more thoroughly than disinterest and sensing that indifference, people often go to extremes, crossing social boundaries to remind us of their existence and that they do matter and have opinions worth considering.

Inclusion is an illustration of care; a caring behaviour produces better people running counter to our market economy that is morphing to become a market society in which everything, even kindness is being commodified, that is it can be bought and sold, it is given a market value.

So rather than seeing people as units of profit and loss, we need to embrace them as mums and dads, brothers and sisters, family and friends, workmates and colleagues, and simply as people with feelings just like you and me.

Stand guard over everything that is public, from education through to health and transport, and prevent, if you can, privatization (a code-word for private profit and disregard for the public), for despite the corporate rhetoric, the sale of public assets is not in our best interests. Yes, stand guard, the financialization of society is driving myriad wedges into our democracy.

And as clumsy as they might have been our Moomba rioters were a precise and timely warning that all is not well with our governance, and it would be wrong of us to casually discount that with “Ahh, that’s just city stuff” as the ingredients abound here too.

Socrates the legendary thinker quoted in Plato’s “Apology” said: “Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention to truth and understanding.”

The Melbourne “rioters” need our understanding and attention to the truth.

Disconnect between Shepparton and rich spend on military infrastructure

There is an alarming disconnect between Australia’s intention to spend heavily enriching it military infrastructure and life here in Shepparton.

Few in this community have any real and intimate understanding of what war is and why it happens, and how it can be avoided, and find themselves in lockstep with the political rhetoric of the hawks, whose allegiance to the military-industrial complex, which, through its hollow promises, does nought by worsen an already damnable situation.

Many whoop and cheer in support of the Turnbull Government’s intentions to spend lavishly on Australia’s military hardware and troop numbers.

Those same people put a high value on personal and national security but fail to understand that the much sought after security they ache for comes from within the individual and not from what is intended by the Turnbull Government.

Many see any suggestion that we should limit or reduce spending on our incongruously termed “defence” infrastructure as naïve and something that simply panders to pacifists or others unaware of human nature and within that what those same critics would claim is our “war instinct”.

However, according to a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, David P. Barash, that instinct simply does not exist.

Professor Barash, who has researched and written about human aggression, peace, and the sexual behaviour of animals and people, argues that those who hold to the “war instinct” idea are wrong and dangerous in clinging to that belief.

David P. Barash.

He discusses capacities and adaptations and while reading and writing are capacities, derivative traits that are unlikely to have been directly selected for, or developed, he says, through cultural processes.

In a recent article published by Aeon entitled “Is there a War Instinct?” Barash wrote: “Similarly, walking and probably running are adaptations; doing cartwheels or handstands are capacities.

“In my view, interpersonal violence is a human adaptation, not unlike sexual activity, parental care, communication and so forth. It is something we see in every human society.

“Meanwhile, war — being historically recent, as well as erratic in worldwide distribution and variation in detail — is almost certainly a capacity. And capacities are neither universal nor mandatory,” he writes.

The Turnbull Government’s intention to spend extravagantly on Australia’s military hardware is not about adaptation, rather it is about capacities; it is about preparing our nation for war.

A nation's strength is in its people, not its military hardware.

Rather than spending ridiculous amounts of our money on these sophisticated boys' toys, Malcolm Turnbull should be spending time with the Australian people building them into an impenetrable force, a society able to withstand any assaults.

Instead of buying war machines, Mr Turnbull should buy for himself a moral compass and share the lessons its points to with his counterparts and then, all Australians.

The 'solar powered clothes dryer' was unknown to young Americans

Using the "solar powered
clothes dryer" - unknown
and a novelty to
two young Americans.

Recently, I watched as two American grand-nieces busied themselves laying out freshly washed clothes on concrete, ignoring a nearby clothes-line.

Assuming it was some American “thing” I didn’t understand or know about, I let them alone and waited until when talking with my sister, their grandmother, later in the day.

She chuckled and said the two girls, both about 17, had never seen grandmother and had no understanding of a clothes line for both of them, although from different families, had never seen clothes hung on a line before as everything went through the electric clothes dryer.

Using the sun to dry things, in this case their clothes was, for them, something of a novelty, and a necessity.

That raised a few thoughts – practically every university student today has never lived without a remote “something” in their lives – television sets for arguments sake are controlled from the couch, never do you have to get up, walk-over and manually change the channel, alter the volume or turn the set on or off.

The call from our PM to be both innovative and agile is not necessarily about making remotes redundant and so force us to be more active and agile, rather it is about seeing Australia back with the frontrunners in terms of doing and creating things that boost growth.

Malcolm Turnbull sees that emergence back at the top coming through agility and innovation; that is in thinking that pushes at the edge of traditional processes and ideas that combine unlikely concepts in hitherto unimagined ways.

However, Mr Turnbull overlooks a few “headwinds” that might delay the arrival as his imagined nirvana.

Those headwinds, discussed by author Robert J Gordon in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War” were rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government.

Although American, there is similar breeze blowing throughout Australia; a breeze many feel as a headwind, such as those discussed recently by the executive officer of the Greater Shepparton Lighthouse Project, Lisa McKenzie.

Lisa, in arguing the “People should be the change they want to see”, talked about the challenges faced by Greater Shepparton’s children, which in many ways echoed the headwinds alluded to by Robert Gordon.

Through its “1000 Conversations” and its efforts to “introduce” our community to its children, Lisa and her team at the Lighthouse Project have created entry points; places through which individuals, groups and organizations can volunteer as mentors, share their wisdom and help the city’s children become adults with a rich civic sense; a richness that makes them better citizens and better people; better in that they come understand the value of “slow time” and within that grasp ancestral knowledge and wisdom

And hopefully, in helping them understand simple things like a clothes-line, the complexity of citizenship will unravel and their civic responsibilities will become obvious.

Mall's problems will not be answered by a 'silver bullet' solution

Shepparton's Maude St Mall.

Answers to what ails Shepparton’s Maude St Mall are not to be found in a silver bullet solution.

No one thing will unravel the mosaic of matters that demand a whole of community response; a cocktail of measures must be implemented to confront the evolving dilemmas of the 21^st Century and so see the mall become a sustainable and bustling social space.

Answers proffered by many consider the mall in isolation and so looked at and applied through that prism they might have some immediate positive impact, but no long-term value.

To take the mall so out of context is unfair both to it and the greater Shepparton community.

An architect friend, who was not talking about the mall, said his contemporaries failed when they simply drew lines around projects and created something that misunderstood its social context, had no sympathy its environment and so did not “talk” with its surrounds.

The mall should not be considered in isolation, rather as is an integral part of Greater Shepparton and by implication the wider world.

Everything and every idea around which the 20^th Century was built is changing, those ideas are slipping away, and fast.

Now it gets tough. Energy scarcity; changes to our weather systems and different social and commercial wants and needs will force a fresh way of living upon us; the city needs densification for as oil become prohibitively expensive, to find, extract and buy, transport will become human powered (cycling, walking) and public rather than private; an increasingly hot city is going to need green oases, such as the beginnings of what have now in our mall; business is morphing from market driven capitalism to a peer-to-peer collaborative process that will need near zero-cost social spaces such the mall where people can gather, share and participate in their community.

A recent discussion in Brisbane about the proliferation of enclosed shopping centres throughout Australia, and around the world, brought praise for what they are, but it was pointed out that although entry was free, they effectively barred low-income people for they had little value beyond shopping, that is spending money.

Deepening the confusion, the much lauded private shopping centres are just that; they are private and so are generally out of bounds to public gatherings that are not about adding to the centre’s growth and profit-based agenda.

Malls, such as that in Shepparton, have a different dynamic in that they are public, they are not enclosed and are wonderful places for the social milieu that is the springboard for the richness that is community.

Shepparton needs to preserve and protect its pedestrian mall; expand and build on what exists; create active pedestrian links to the city’s railway station in preparation for a dearth of energy; look “up-river”, consider how the world is changing and where Shepparton needs to be in 2050.

The council of the City of Greater Shepparton, to its credit has looked “up-river” through its Commercial Activity Centres Strategy, but has failed to understand that the Shepparton of the 21^st Century cannot be built from the ideas of last century.

Searching for Shepparton's 'Big Idea'

Age is about wisdom, but for youth, it is fertility.

And, it is from the latter that a local group is hoping this year to source the Goulburn Valley’s next “Big Idea”, from youthful minds, teeming with innovative thoughts.

Shepparton’s Slap Tomorrow is working with the city’s Lighthouse Project, several senior local secondary education people and representatives of the  City of Greater Shepparton to set up “Big Ideas, 2016”.

Big Ideas 2016 is about encouraging young people to think about and explore concepts that could successfully and safely take the Goulburn Valley, and all the communities in it, safely deep into the 21st Century.

A Big Idea working group has agreed to further explore the project in the hope of launching it early in the new school year to engage students and teachers and encourage them to discuss what big idea they would like to explore.

The student initiated Big Ideas would need to be unique, or significantly different from what exists giving them legitimacy for the Goulburn Valley urgently needs fresh ideas; ideas that break free sclerotic 20th Century thinking; ideas that are environmentally, socially and economically innovative and responsible.

Discussions about the Big Idea project have been energetic and wide-ranging, but the essence of what is imagined blends beautifully with the calls for ideas and innovation from Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

Those appeals from the PM will reverberate with hollowness unless Mr Turnbull and his government can legislate equally innovatively to ensure that any revolutionary thoughts from such concepts as Big Ideas 2016 don’t die in their embryotic state, but are energised by State support.

Success for most of the 20th Century’s great innovations and companies, including Apple, can be traced to work done within government research organizations.

Discussing the need for State involvement to apply the innovation needed to address climate change, the author of “The Entrepreneurial State” Mariana Mazzucato said: “…we are again in the need of an active State that takes on the high uncertainty of its early stages, which the business sector fears.”

Early discussions imagine the students, and their ideas, would be guided by an acknowledged entrepreneurial mentor who could play a role in ensuring the resultant big ideas actually implemented.

But more is needed for without demonstrable and vigorous State support, most any idea, regardless of its ultimate societal value, struggles to make it through what is known as the “valley of death” – that time from infancy to commercial maturity.

The possibility of Shepparton being a centre of excellence has frequently been discussed by some and now with Big Ideas 2016 as the focus, maybe we can imagine a better way, blending what already exists to innovate our way, driven by the fertile minds of our youth, to an even greater, Greater Shepparton.

A 'good bloke' who helped me become a local

One’s public acceptance as a local is measured in many ways; personally it arrives when you attend a funeral of someone who is unquestionably a local.

The late Chris McPherson -
a 'good bloke' who
always 'had your back'.

That sense of being a local arrived sometime late in the 1980s when I was standing talking with friends after the funeral of a fellow I had got to know quite well since arriving in Shepparton earlier in the decade.

Suddenly I felt as if I was a local, far short of the 25 years many deem as the qualifying period to acquire such an attribution.

Well, sadly the death last week of another friend again reinforced my awareness of being a local.

This time however, it is different as not only was Chris McPherson my friend, he had given me work, he was my boss, or more correctly an integral part of the McPherson Family for whom I worked for many decades.

Chris was, in colloquial terms, “a good bloke”, someone who always “had your back” and although he may have been uncomfortable about things you said or did, he always stood beside you, helping fend off the critics.

Having been the Editor of this newspaper for more than 15 years, familiarity with Chris’s unflinching loyalty, his tireless enthusiasm and ceaseless endeavour for the success of the McPherson Media Group was evident every day.

Chris and I were fundamentally different people with seemingly incompatible values and although that may have created a publically never seen fissure in our relationship, it actually generated a strange productive energy between us that produced a vital balance.

Success in business for Chris, hinged on a certain relentless drive for profit and growth, which saw him painted as a rather ruthless businessman, a portrayal that did him a disservice, as he was actually a soft and gentle man.

At least twice, while praising the group’s staff for the role they had played in the overall success of the company, he became so emotional that he was unable to continue and his brother Ross took over.

Chris was known for many things, among them his love of the outdoors, but his notoriety as a local took an unprecedented leap when he became the driver of the Big Blokes Lunch to support prostate cancer.

Chris’s honesty while speaking at one of those events about his diagnosis and living with the disease was so powerful and moving that many ranked his address as among the best they had ever heard. Some people were reduced to tears.

Tragedy in one’s life frequently evokes honesty and openness that defies publically known and understood personal traits and that was the case when Chris talked about his prostate cancer.

Yes, Chris was a good bloke, he always stood with me through the ructions of running a newspaper and it is with great pride I claim he was a friend, a local friend.