A friend robbed of his vitality and optimism

Juris Greste is a friend.

Juris Greste with his wife, Lois.

“Good friend” would be stretch, but strangely it feels a little like that.

Acquaintance with Juris arose nearly a decade ago because of this column; not that he had read it, but a friend had and it was he who urged my involvement with the Melbourne-based Urban Design Forum.

Juris is a retired Brisbane-based urban designer, known to his Victorian counterparts and an infrequent visitor to forum meetings where his vitality and optimism was evident to all.

He is still those things, but the arrest in Cario and charging of his reporter son, Peter, who worked with the Al Jazeera news-service, has robbed him of some of that zest, rather, most of it.

Beyond the fact that Juris knows me, he has no obvious connection with Shepparton, except that he and his wife Lois have turned to the Federal Government, our government, to negotiate with Egyptian authorities for their son’s release.

Peter Greste.

Juris a dapper, articulate man, who is always smiling was seen last year at the Brisbane launch of the Urban Design Forum’s 25-year anniversary coffee table-size book featuring stories from those around Australia involved directly or peripherally in urban design, including Juris.

Charges against Peter are, according to Juris and Lois, “absurd” and to quote an ABC report: “To think or allege that Peter or his high-achieving colleagues would jeopardise their mid-life international careers by unethical or improper practices is completely preposterous," Mr Greste said.

Egyptian authorities are accusing Peter and his crew of two of meetings with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group the military-installed government has declared “terrorist”.

For most of us, the fortunes of a reporter in Egypt is just another of the countless stories that flood in from around the world about some unknown person in some obscure place that does not compute as personal precedence goes, naturally, to the daily dilemmas of living.

The 25-year Urban Design Forum coffee
 table book the Juris has contributed to.

The importance to Goulburn Valley people of illustrating their support for the likes of Peter Greste is understandable slim for it rates poorly compared to a pressing mortgage payment, job security, maybe your dog’s eaten rat poison or one of your kids are crook.

Should you care; should you push concern about Peter Greste through and above all those important parochial things? Yes.

It’s a tough call for he probably means little or nothing to most of us, but his treatment is further evidence of the weirdness of the world; a weirdness driven by perverse ideologies, zealots addicted to power and greed that can only be challenged and changed if people like you and me tell those who can change things.

Protest Peter’s detention; talk with our Member for Murray, Sharman Stone, and share your concerns with Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop.

The earnest wish is "to be good and have a nice family"

“I want to be good and have a nice family”.

It is images such as this with which
the Kununurra Midnight Prowlers
are associated.

So said Elise (not her real name), in a Radio National story about the “Kununurra Midnight Prowlers”.

The hopes of the young aboriginal girl said something about the endemic nature of decency and the need to replicate that prevails in humanity despite seemingly intractable disadvantages.

Elise is one of a “family” of young aboriginals who gather on the streets of the northern Western Australian town at dusk and as a “Prowler” roams the town’s streets causing trouble, damage, drinking and smoking, and, as dawn approaches, disappears.

To “be good” and have a “nice family” are, or course subjective and from my view and that of Elise, distorted by “white fella” values. Elise’s hopes might fall well short of what many consider “good” and “nice”.

Her hopes though should never be disparaged though for within them is something that surges within all of us: a striking need to procreate and do it within the norms of the culture in which we are embedded.

Therein lies much of the trouble for Elise, for like most of her fellow “Prowlers”, she lives astride two cultures; that into which she was born having been destroyed while the offered replacement is ineffective, ineffectual and inadequate leaving Elise and her fellows trapped and living in a vacuum - a detention centre without the razor wire.

Elise says she has stopped using marijuana and intends to break her smoking habit, but the malaise of uncertainty brought on through living with two inherently different cultures begets social havoc in Kununurra, and for Elise and her fellows.

Elise and her indigenous counterparts have been rushed, in what is a blink of time, from tribalism where they had recognition and respect to the individualism of modern western life where they have everything, but nothing.

The chasm between what was and what is seems impassable to the likes of the Prowlers presenting the Federal Government’s intended 400 plus truancy officers for indigenous communities with challenges in which traditional solutions, or disciplines, are unlikely to have much effect.

To break a person’s connection with their culture is socially disruptive and so it seems that in some way, regardless of whatever cultures align themselves, that prime among the hierarchy of needs to be answered must be the preservation of a person’s understood ways of living.

As it stands the challenge is with the indigenous people, in this instance the Kununurra Midnight Prowlers, but in reality it is with us, the “Johnny-come-latelies” to this continent, and in ensuring our cultural connections, we need to modify our behaviours and so allow indigenous people maintain theirs and live fulfilled lives.

Living close to their culture, they can be “good and have a nice family”.

Draughts are the enemy of energy efficient houses

Unwanted draughts are the great enemy of maintaining comfortable temperature in homes.

In the winter leaky house quickly becom

e colder and in the summer it is the reverse.

So in the winter the air you have paid to warm, and used lot of energy to achieve, escapes through the almost invisible gaps, while in summer you have again expended huge amounts energy, not to mention cash, to cool the interior of your house, only to have hot air leaking in.

Melbourne’s South East Council Climate Change Alliance (SECCCA), an amalgam of eight south east municipal councils, has worked hard to educate the community, and itself, about the challenges arising from climate change.

Understanding the limits of its influence, SECCCA has focussed, primarily, on housing and so through a collaborative project has built and set up a display home, which doubles as a community centre, where people can go to learn about planning and building a low energy use house.

Beyond housing, SECCCA considers agricultural emissions, electric vehicles, public lighting, education into schools and resource efficient farming.

SECCCA’s climate change project coordinator, Daniel Pleiter, puts draught sealing at the top “must do” things when building a new home.

He has said that also of critical importance was the orientation of the house on the block, double glazing, solar energy, insulation and shading.

Mr Pleiter has argued that draught sealing for both extremes of weather is so important in terms of conserving energy and the year-round comfort for the occupants, that people should be insisting home builder give it the highest priority.

He said new style material and processes are readily available, but even if those are not used, then a tightening up of general building standards, meaning the elimination of gaps allowing the creation of draughts, would make the home more comfortable and noticeably reduce its energy us.

That lift in building standards, something he said was relatively easily achieved, although it required some training, the correct positioning of the house on the block, insulation, solar energy and shading were relatively cheap, easy to do and would have measureable impact on both comfort and cost.

Mr Pleiter said builders were the first line of attack in improving Australia’s housing stock suggesting they needed to work hard to ensure homes they built were draught proof.

Selandra Community Place is a collaborative process involving the City of Casey, Stockland, Henley Properties Group and the SECCCA.

Members of Slap Tomorrow from Shepparton, together with the City of Greater Shepparton’s Sustainability and Environmental Officer, Mr Travis Turner, recently inspected the display building and spent nearly three hours talking with Mr Pleiter.

Slap Tomorrow is advocating for a similar house to be built in Shepparton illustrating advantages and cost savings to Goulburn.

Adding community gardens to our parks would help build our resilience

Morning walks regularly take me past two or three of Shepparton’s small community parks south of the railway station.

One of Shepparton's many
small parks that could easily
be a community garden.

This mosaic of parks was once the focus of activity with regular gatherings, kids playing and people talking, adding much neighbourhood building and bonding.

With rare exceptions, and one is Victory Park in St George’s Road for with a cricket pitch and being big enough for soccer is used regularly, most have fallen largely into disuse.

The City of Greater Shepparton has invested, in some cases, in the establishment sophisticated and safe play equipment, but missing, mostly, is the throng of kids and adults that would bring life to the parks.

A fellow who lives near a park said that it was once a space used every two or three weeks for an event organized by a former local councillor, but now it was largely unused and simply little more than a “short-cut’ for pedestrians.

A retired fellow, who lived close to a nearby park when his kids were young, said they always wanted to play there, but now its use, despite having a sophisticated and safe playground, had dropped close to zero.

The parks, well cared for and ringed by houses are a wonderful community asset and are perfectly placed to play a critical role in helping those nearby feed themselves as a different future emerges.

Beyond being the perfect place for community gardens they are equally a perfect space to launch a community strengthening program; a program that hopefully would allow escape from the individualism that has predominated for decades, but happily goes missing when communities are troubled by disaster, as is evident with such things as bushfires.

Realities, facts that are clearly indisputable, point to the importance of the City of Greater Shepparton taking the lead, that is what leaders are meant to do, to begin a movement that would see our mosaic of parks become, in addition to what they already are, community gardens.

The present picture in Australia is one of plenty, but with the rapid depletion of various fossil resources such as oil, gas and phosphorous (an essential ingredient in fertilizers and without which most of Australia’s ancient soils will grow little), and to further complicate things, top soil, the abundance we enjoy is finite.

Living on the driest of continents, we need to do all possible to save water and with a whole neighbourhood contributing to just one garden, such conservation is possible.

Listening to many of Australia’s leading thinkers who have no obvious ideological bias or links to various lobby groups, say we have passed our economic “sweet spot” and with the resources boom in retreat, our future resilience is linked to far simpler things; things such as community gardens.

Do what you can to ensure SPC Ardmona's future, momentarily at least

Yes, each of us needs to do what we can to ensure the survival of Shepparton’s SPC Ardmona processing plant, for the moment at least.

One need not look too far or too deep to see and understand good reasons why the factory and the infrastructure it depends upon play a critical role in the economic wellbeing of this community.

Visit The News to add you weight to campaign.

Broaden you view and quickly it become obvious that the much lauded level-playing field is, and always has favoured the few.

Yes, we need SPC Ardmona to stay about for a while, but just long enough for us to learn about, and understand what it is we need to do to build a Goulburn Valley-wide community sufficiently resilient enough to withstand the unfolding society-wide shocks of the next few decades.

Rather than allow our communities to become implicated in the narrow financial definitions of globalization and instead of pursuing ever expanding growth, we should be working for “just enough growth”.

Success of a business should not be measured by a particular percentage growth each year, rather through its contribution to the community from which it draws its workers and to how many people it provides regular employment.

Success should not be measured through the raw brutality of the bottom line, rather whether or not that company is an integral player in the richness of the community in which it operates and within that how it embraces and cares about everyone from initial suppliers to the final customer.

Without stumbling into the rhetoric of the doomsayer, let’s us acknowledge that the future, even the immediate future, is going to be different from what has been, and is.

So what do we do? First, and of critical importance is to support this newspaper’s campaign to press our politicians to support short term goals of SPC Ardmona.

We need as much time as we can leverage to ready ourselves for an energy-depleted future as we surrender a lifestyle that is enlivened, almost totally by oil and coal.

Technophobes promise all sorts of wondrous energy solutions, but the few existing and scalable ideas, beyond simply using less, are solar and wind.

Support solar and wind ideas; support projects that encourage people to initially use less energy; live closer to where you work; cycle and walk where possible and look to your community to source whatever it is you need, including your food.

Join and support groups which are doing what they can to help us understand how we live fulfilling lives in an energy depleted future; read, read and read, and listen, listen and listen to learn about the societal instability that is arising from the exponential growth of recent decades.

For the record: our Federal MPs have received my SPC Ardmona plea.

Forty five minutes of life lost, never to be recovered

Some 45 minutes of my life was lost, never to be recovered, sitting through a rather pointless discussion at a recent meeting of the City of Greater Shepparton.

A common sight in the 19th
century, but motor oil trucks
will be a rarity in the 21st.

It wasn’t just my life, it was also that of all seven councillors, its staff at the meeting, the gallery of about 50 people and a reporter from this newspaper.

My views about where humanity is heading are less than encouraging and the intellectual fracas at the recent did little to alleviate or in fact change them.

Sitting through the discussion, I was unable to escape from the thought that in being unable to avoid status quo thinking, all ideas are dead on arrival.

Discussion about drainage in Shepparton East appeared at first something of a “no-brainer”, but quickly the conversation devolved into one about the meaning of words, amendments, notices of motion, withdrawal of amendments, explanations about existing council policies, conversations about procedural matters between the mayor, Cr Jenny Houlihan, and senior officers, until the original motion was finally put and passed.

In a world where all will be as it was, the near hour-long deliberation probably made some sense, but any thoughtful person willing to dispassionately acknowledge the unfolding dilemmas is sharply aware that cumulative changes illustrate the future will not be anything at all like what was.

We face disturbingly different times and so rather than having our council discuss such distractions as drainage schemes, we should be having a council of war.

Although the responsible men, from our PM down, never talk about such things, our future will be punctuated by problems of food, water and energy shortages, complicated by a climate foreign to human needs.

So rather than use valuable time discussing parochial problems, council needs to avoid such narrow thinking, consider the wider picture and then apply processes that will ensure the resilience of our communities; resilience that will prepare us for fulfilling lives, despite serious reductions in both energy and food.

Agriculture and so our present food system is critically dependent upon oil and natural gas, both of which are seriously depleted, despite the chest-beating about how to retrieve previously inaccessible coal seam gas and unconventional oil.

The bounty common in our
supermarkets may soon not
be so common.

Science illustrates that recovery of both is limited, can disrupt much of the surrounding geological structure, pollute aquifers causing irreparable damage and is water-use intensive, all processes we can ill-afford.

The bounty we see on our supermarket shelves is there, obviously, because of much hard work by many, but primarily because of the hydrocarbons that allow for modern food production processes.

Council needs to dramatically reduce our water use and plan for a robust resilient future in which surplus energy in all its forms will be short supply, being dramatically different from what we have known.

Making a conundrum even more of a contortion

Life often throws up fascinating conundrums.



Environment Minister, Greg Hunt.

The latest arose when reading the “Ministerial Foreword” of the Emissions Reduction Fund green paper put out by our Federal Government on which public comment has been invited.

Nothing is more critical than preparing Australians to deal with the unfolding dilemma of climate change and so the content and intent of the Green Paper makes it the most important document in our country’s history.

Written with a sense of intergenerational responsibility, the Green Paper, which has at its heart the Coalition’s Direct Action Plan for the control of domestic carbon dioxide emissions, could make Australia a leader in climate change mitigation. It won’t though.

The final paragraph his Ministerial Forward, Australia’s Minister for the Environment, Greg Hunt, wrote: “Our goal is to conserve our natural environment while ensuring strong economic growth”.

Mr Hunt is celebrated in many quarters as a remarkably intelligent, quick thinking fellow, making it curious that he fails to understand that such an observation is contradictory.

Strong economic growth and preservation of the natural environment are diametrically opposed.

The first is about the creation of high entropy goods resulting in obscene waste that is offensive, and ultimately destructive, to the latter, the natural environment.

The irony of the document arrives in the “Executive Summary” where is says: “The Australian Government acknowledges the science of climate change and supports national and global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”. It clearly doesn’t.

That is a cleverly worded statement as acknowledgement of and resultant action because of that recognition are decidedly different things and nothing our relatively new Tony Abbott-led Government has done yet suggests it actually understands the seriousness of the science.

Australia is considered a mature civilization and in claiming such a lofty position, the responsible men ought to take the time to read the thoughts of Melbourne-based philosopher, John Armstrong who wrote, “In Search of Civilization: Remaking a tarnished idea”.

He said: “Civilization is seen as a rigorous artifice, designed to save us from ourselves. Life is regarded as a mess that needs to be cleaned up.

“We need to subordinate our wayward desires to law or rationality or justice; ideas that carry a prohibition, that deny our wishes,” he wrote.

So here we face another conundrum – are we or are we not civilized? Should we opt for the latter then there is nothing else we can do but demand that our Federal Government act in a way that illustrates deep concern for those yet unborn and so without a vote or influence.

A target of five per cent drop in carbon emissions by 2020 is pitifully inadequate and if the world is to have any understandable chance of avoiding catastrophic change we need 80 per cent this decade.