A seminal year in Australian history

This is a seminal year in Australian history.
More Australians will retire from work in 2011 than will set out on their work-life journey.

CEO of the Committee for
 Melbourne, Andrew
McLeod.

And then, some 15 years later, 2025, there will be a whole raft of Australians retiring who have had superannuation all their work life.
Both matters will shape our towns and cities and are just two critical demographics being considered by the Committee for Melbourne.
The committee arose some 25 years ago from what was then a seemingly directionless city and since has been actively working to make the whole geographic organism that is Greater Melbourne a better place in which to live.
The idea that became the City for Melbourne was driven by who were then some of the city’s leading businessmen backed by some of Australia’s pre-eminent companies.
Those same ideas have spread to several regional Victoria centres and recently the committee’s Chief Executive Office, Andrew McLeod, said he and another from his team would happily visit Shepparton to discuss, and initiate the groundwork, for the establishment of a Committee for Shepparton.
Asked why such a committee would be different than an existing chamber of commerce, Mr McLeod, said such organisations have a primary interest in the commercial wellbeing and health of a town or city, while a Committee for Shepparton would have a more sweeping mandate.
Such committees consider all aspects of a city’s liveability, transport, the placement of residential areas and their density, services available in and to the city, access to and availability of leisure and recreation, and the creation of public spaces.
Considering the demographics of Melbourne, Mr McLeod said his committee anticipates Melbourne’s population growing to about eight million by 2060.
Melbourne had about two million in 1960 and according to Mr McLeod those of his parent’s generation had overseen the doubling of that number to recently see it voted as the world’s most liveable city. “Why”, he asked, “can’t we do that again”.
Talking recently with a group of architects, planners, urban designers and others involved in shaping our cities, Mr McLeod said it was critical to get people excited about the future and heighten their optimism.
Supported by business, the committee obviously leans toward projects and ideas that improve the city’s commercial life, but that is softened through membership and involvement by academia and a number of welfare organizations.
Such organizations, Mr McLeod points out, are free from the rigours of democracy in that the effectiveness of those involved is not time restricted and do not depend on fanciful populist impressions of those who elect them.
“Committees for” concern themselves with many things, among them social cohesion, which Mr McLeod says, is a rare and fragile commodity.

Public brutality brings on a personal death

Hold your breath, steel your heart and look away for one of our number dies today (Thursday, September 22).

Troy Davis

The U.S. pardons board on Tuesday rejected a last-ditch plea for clemency from death row inmate, Troy Davis. He will be put to death today at 9am by lethal injection at a prison in Jackson, south of Atlanta.
News’ readers may well be remote in geographical terms, but in a psychological sense, alarming close as if it is happening here in Shepparton, particularly if we allow ourselves to think about the rather brutal death of Davis.
Tired clichés about “state sanctioned murder” and “racial injustice” (Davis is black and the police officer it is alleged he murdered is white) leap to mind, but deeper issues about capital punishment warrant our attention, and thought.
Capital punishment had never troubled me much, one way or the other, until I read George Orwell’s “A hanging” and through that short essay he ignited in me a revulsion that another should, or could, die at my say so.

George Orwell

Orwell wrote about the “unspeakable wrongness” of hanging a man, in this case it’s a lethal injection, but the result, however, is the same.
An image from Orwell’s essay cemented in my thoughts emerges from a description of Orwell, then a police officer in India, walking to the gallows with the condemned fellow only to have the man step around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet.
That very human thing was strangely important to a man who was just minutes from dying – that rich image lives with me, emphasizing the unnerving disconnect between what is human and death.
Capital punishment was finally abolished in all Australian states in 1984 and Ronald Ryan was hanged in 1967, finding a sad niche in our history to be the last to die at the direction of the state.
Considerable doubt exists about the guilt of Davis and even the former US president Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI have joined the campaign to spare his life, a life that ends today after more than two decades of legal manoeuvering.
Davis’s death will be witnessed by those required by law and with them will be the dead police officer’s widow and children.
As much as we might like, we can’t hide in the anonymity of the crowd as it is in fact the “crowd” that is putting Davis to death, not some impersonal piece of machinery.
Fortunately, Australians have shown the exceptional good sense to step aside from capital punishment and now, in another move that will further enhance our mental health, we need to consider our behaviour in the Middle East and how it equates with capital punishment.

We need to watch and learn from our front row seat

Goulburn Valley people, and their Australian fellows, have a front row seat to watch the removal of another rivet in the superstructure supporting the U.S.

America's President,
Mr Barack Obama.

U.S. president, Barack Obama, has argued for a package of tax cuts and government spending aimed at invigorating his country’s economy.
The package, worth about $US447 billion ($A421 billion), is ill-directed, being aimed at a return to business as usual and in doing so appeasing most Americans who see their comfort in living as they have for many decades.
Rather than spend the country’s wealth on a way of life that is unquestionably unsustainable, Mr Obama and those around him, should overtly embrace the hope, audacity and the idea of change that saw him elected in 2008.
America is staring at economic collapse; a societal breakdown that will end its world hegemony and is the natural outcome of what former political philosophy professor and noted author, Sheldon Wolin, has described as “inverted totalitarianism”.
Wolin sees decided danger in the dysfunctional marriage between government and the corporate world, a union that he argues has routed democracy leaving America with a militarized, industrial complex.
Survival of that complex hinges on an obedient populace, one, which in Wolin’s terms, is distracted and titillated by such things as sport, entertainment and discussion and debates about what are ultimately unimportant matters.
And so while democracy survives in name, what America has, and Australia trails along behind, is inverted totalitarianism – a facade claiming social equity, but which is really a process favouring a few.
Mr Obama’s plan does have tax cuts for both employee and employers and billions to prevent teacher lay-offs and hire more police and fire officers, and it would spend $50 billion to improve highways, railroads, transit and aviation.
Examined, however, through the prism of climate change and seriously depleted energy resources, the plan’s outline quickly becomes distorted and dated.
Rather than grasp at exhausted ideas, the Americans need to abandon what once worked, and failed, allowing them to embark on an adventurous and exciting new project that would fundamentally change the fabric of its society.
Such systemic change is resisted by an American elite that appears unable to comprehend the fraying of its empire and beyond that is so misled by its own beliefs and values, that its impending doom goes unseen.
Rather than rescuing flailing and failing companies, the U.S. should be advancing concepts that call for the localization of communities and employing the idea of late author and influential economist and statistician, E.F. Schumacher that “small is beautiful”.
America is the world’s biggest and most influential economy and as its collapse will render ours destitute; we need to watch attentively, and learn, from our front row seat.

Living and coping with the challenges of Alzheimer's disease

Australia’s ageing population brings many riches, but they do not come without a cost.

Old age offers much, but
brings many complications.

The knowledge and wisdom of the baby boomers, now mostly in their sixties and beyond, is being lost with Commonwealth Government statistics showing that about 250 000 people in Australia have dementia.
Dementia, the government’s Department of Health and Ageing has said, is not a natural part of ageing and there are many different types of diseases and conditions that cause dementia-like symptoms.
After the age of 65, it adds, the likelihood of being diagnosed with dementia doubles every five years and people over the age of 85 currently have a one in four chance of developing dementia.
The financial cost to Australia is huge and growing, but the unmeasured cost is the physical hurt and emotional pain imposed on carers and others supporting those who actually have dementia.
Dementia is triggered by many diseases, and among them is Alzheimer’s disease, which worsens the functioning of a person’s brain impacting on such things as such as speech and language, personality, decision-making and judgment or awareness and ability to interact with the environment.
Difficulties arising from a brain whose capacities are being eroded have become intimately familiar in the past decade with first my mother-in-law dying from complications associated with Alzheimer’s disease and now my father-in-law, although in his late 80s, is wrestling with the same adversities.
He is a beautiful man (I accept my familial biases), honest, loyal, generous, courteous and in every sense a gentleman.
Those qualities still exist and were evident when his daughter, my wife, and I cared for him for about a week just recently.
It was a lovely, but sad, time – Basil was a wonderful houseguest during which time it was important to focus on the moment and not think too much about him once being the efficient and effective manager of the Echuca livestock saleyards.

My father-in-law
 managed events such as this
 two or three times a week.

He had once, two or three times a week, orchestrated sales involving hundreds of animals, co-ordinating their sale, movement within the yards and, ultimately, their readiness for transport by the buyers.
Alzheimer’s disease has been the formal diagnosis and steps have been taken to slow its onset and although they have been effective to some degree, the side-effects, occasionally, have been unwelcome.
Patriarchs are often portrayed as the rock upon which families depend and the mental deterioration of one shouldering that responsibility brings a seismic shift in family dynamics.
His authority, seemingly suddenly erased by the disease, has shifted what were once his responsibilities to his children bringing convoluted undercurrents that are worsened by the complexities of emotions arising from these chaotic times.
The raw cost to society through the loss of a valuable member is measurable, but not so the unsettling confusion surrounding that loss.

Security on our streets begins when we flick a switch

Finding security on Shepparton’s streets seems pretty straightforward – it begins with the flicking of a switch.

It is unlikely your
 television has a
  switch anything like
 this one, but if it had,
 then moving it to the
 off position initiates
 security on our streets.

However, that is reductionism taken to its extreme as the sought after security arises from a social paradigm of such complexity that it makes brain surgery look artless.
Safety on Shepparton’s streets, as is the case for any town or city, begins when we reach for the remote, turn off our televisions and effectively remove from our lives the programmed violence and its daily assault on human values.
We are born as empty vessels and as our lives take shape we are filled by the influences of those around us, the way of life of those who raise us and the philosophies and values of the institutions that impact on our lives, from our schools, the government, laws, the media and finally, and critically, our entertainment.
Television is unchallenged as the one form of media that has almost unimpeded access to our lives, influencing our values from the seemingly impossible cheery morning shows and attention grabbing frivolities throughout the day, to the early evening news and current affairs shows that pander to the corporatism of the world, and the endless blood, gore and drama of evening viewing that ignites and excites our emotions.
Television simply fills up all the emotional holes in life to make the road smooth, but in a strange contradiction it is also hardening our values making us less conscious of community and consequently less willing to step away from our addiction to support our fellows.
And so while the road is smooth it leads to nowhere, at least not to a place where our streets are secure.
Television seeps almost unknowingly into our consciousness, while newspapers, books and magazines demand a more active participation and leads readers into a line by line contemplation and judgement that encourages reflection.

Neil Postman

Being aware of our ever-reducing attention span, television doesn’t allow for such luxuries, hurrying from scenes of war, death and destruction to heart-warming images of a team of rescuers hauling a helpless horse from a bog.
This seamless shift from tragedy and scenes of human deviousness to images of human goodness confuses the intellect and as discussed by Neil Postman in “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, we become desensitized to death and other human difficulties.
That, aligned with a violent computer games and movies in which violence is celebrated, tells the viewers/participants that whatever troubles them can be resolved by bellicose behaviour and so as night follows day, aggression, in its many forms, stalks our streets.
Modern life has conspired with the liberty afforded by our streets to rob them of the what it is those public places allow, a social life that has the wonderful addendum of security.   

Innovation and aultruism first line of defence

Altruism took centre stage with the success of Shepparton’s recent Biggest Ever Blokes lunch.

Prostate problems are
 something men usually
 die with, rather than from.

The philanthropy ignited by the now annual event warrants applause, but probably even more important is the awareness it creates about prostate cancer.
There is an inherent reluctance among one half of the population, blokes, to discuss personal, physical bits such as their prostate gland.
Sexual prowess is of huge importance to men and difficulties with their prostate is inextricably linked to that aspect of their lives and so often is it something, for most blokes, not talked about or only referred to obliquely through black humour.
The Blokes Biggest Lunch draws what is really just another moment in the lives of men – sadly fatal for many – out from its shadowy existence and makes it a more acceptable, and understandable, human experience.
Beyond being a significant social event, which in itself is therapeutic, the lunch is about raising cash to help efforts to find a solution to prostate cancer and so in a broad sense is about the wellbeing of men.
I do wonder, however, if the even more pressing and sweeping difficulty of the damage humans are causing to earth’s atmosphere would garner equal interest and support. That being a rhetorical question, I know it would not.
Nearly 3500 men die every year in Australia because of prostate problems and as sad as that is, it is inconsequential compared to the decimation of people that awaits when human induced changes to earth’s atmosphere begin to illustrate that it is really nature that calls the shots, not us.
The same influential group the gathered to hear and talk about prostate cancer, need to again assemble and discuss their response to the fact that our planet is in peril.

Dr Graeme Pearman

Rather than simply dip in their pockets, they need to actively encourage a reduction in our dependence on fossil fuels and for the broad well-being of all who live here, they should act individually, or as a group, to make innovation of way of life.
Evolution is far too slow – just two weeks ago, the former Chief of Atmospheric Research and CSIRO Climate Director, Dr GraemePearman, told Melbourne’s Bayside Climate Action Group that in considering global warming, we have just four to five years in which to act.
Evolution takes time, time we don’t have and so in its place we need intelligent design – that is intelligent design of the entire human infrastructure.
Every company, from the smallest two-man operation to the mega-corporation, and everything in between, needs to continue doing what it does, but on a diet which will end its energy obesity .
Innovation may solve the difficulty of prostate cancer; innovation, and altruism, is the primary defence against global warming.

The sun sets on the era of cheap and abundant energy

Pause, if you will, look back and take in the spectacular sunset as the era of cheap and abundant energy slips below the horizon.

Windmills could again be common as we
 witness the sun set on the era of cheap 
and abundant energy.

It’s over: nearly three centuries of phenomenal growth ignited by humanity’s cleverness and hard work, made possible by the unleashing of ancient sunlight in the form of fossil fuels, is ending.
The feast is finished and a famine of energy is shaping to bring on what is in fact a true famine, a decided dearth of food to feed earth’s ever-growing population.
As with other life forms, human numbers ballooned when the circumstances allowed and in that goldilock’s-like epoch, those years when it was not too hot or too cold and we had, thanks to oil, a team of labourers working non-stop for us.
However, those “labourers” are tiring and soon, after a couple of centuries of our wasteful use of the ancient sunlight that became, among other things, oil, the tireless work they have done will again fall to us, changing our lives in ways we can’t yet even contemplate.
Enjoy the sunset for the following sunrise will be a red sky in the morning, which, if we take note of a sailor’s adage, will be a warning.
I feel like weeping as the realization that this wonderful life is ending sweeps over me, but then my optimism returns as the wonder of human resilience, innovation and tenacity fills my mind.
We have lived for nearly three centuries as if the limitations of nature were irrelevant, arrogantly striding the world confident that humanity had successfully manipulated the world to suit itself when all along it was Mother Nature who was actually in charge.

The late
E.F.Schumacher.

We stand between an emotional sunset and a troubling dawn that will introduce us to a new era in which the comforts of the past couple of centuries will evaporate, meaning the essential positivity that has sustained us for decades will still be in demand, but directed at different outcomes.
The dichotomy between never-ending growth, something most economists consider the epitome of good business, and earth’s ecological finitude illustrates an alarming, and a societal threatening, misunderstanding of realities.
The late author, E.F.Schumacher, discussed the realities of primary and secondary goods with the former being provided by nature and the second by human effort.
Beyond that, however, there are tertiary goods where fanciful abstractions on the world’s economy created from nothing are ultimately worth nothing.
The serious shrinkage of fossil fuels, complicated by a crumbling economy takes us closer to the abyss, but standing between us and that fall is the richness, versatility, resilience and tenacity of our fellows and if we stand with them, then that striking sunset will lead to a different,  but better,  day.