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The author of this blog is deeply apologetic over the lack of new pics and stories. It may be difficult for millions of readers to understand, but yours truly is actually too busy to write at the moment. How can a man who does not work for a living be too busy, you say?
We are in transition again, and there is a lot of preparation required for this particular move. On Saturday, we will be traveling back to North America. We’ll stop in Portland to see my son and his family, spend Christmas in Nova Scotia with our daughter, then head down east coast of the U.S.A. From January to June we will be in Durham, North Carolina. My wife will be teaching a course at Duke during a sabbatical semester away from the University of Melbourne.
There has been no shortage of lively events in this part of the world. The Liberals had such a big fight about a Labour plan to introduce emissions trading that Malcolm Turnbull was toppled from leadership. His team had negotiated with the government to go along with emissions trading and this did not sit well with the more conservative members of the party. Tony Abbott has taken over. He’s just challenged Prime Minister Rudd to a series of debates about the emissions trading scheme.
Abbott’s a former Rhodes Scholar, so I’m sure the debate will be intelligent and enlightening. Australia is one of the biggest contributors to global warming around on a per capita basis (if not the biggest) and the country stands to be severely affected by an increase in temperature. Weather plays a huge role in bushfires, and the current agricultural practices are unsustainable.
But Aussies, like Americans, are highly suspicious of scientists, intellectuals and environmentalists and they don’t care for change based on something they can’t see. Even intelligent individuals are capable of convincing themselves that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by tree huggers. I’m just not sure what they think the purpose is. What do we stand to gain? This is not a case of simply wanting to say “I told you so.”
I was happy to see that some young students from Damascus College in Ballarat are committed to countering the spin that is currently coming out of the mainstream media. They have built themselves a speedy velomobile, and they are currently riding from Darwin to Melbourne. That is a distance of 3775 kilometers (2360 miles) across the inhospitable Outback.
They started November 29th and hope to arrive on December 9. They have already ridden across the continent. Right now they are resting up in Adelaide for the final push. The aim is to raise funds and awareness about the impact of global warming on the poor people in the world. Cheer them on or contribute to their quest at “Rage Against Greenhouse Emissions” at http://roderage.com.au/
Even the briefest visit to Australia will make one thing blindingly obvious to the visitor: the most colorful people in this country are not rap musicians, artists, gay activists, pimps or drug dealers; they are the men and women who work with tools and trucks.
Anyone who drives a ‘ute” (utility vehicle), works at a construction site, paves a driveway, plants trees or darts up the sidewalk on a motorbike delivering the mail, (delivering anything for that matter), must be dressed in a shade of yellow, orange or green that would make a butterfly blush.
It’s a safety thing.
I’ve been told by one of my eccentric cycling companions that some tool users are very, very touchy about their tools. So, the colorful plumage may also be one way of saying, “back off, mate.” If the Aussie equivalent of Homer Simpson was in the middle of a nuclear meltdown, he could get very annoyed if a nuclear engineer attempted to plug his finger in the radioactive dyke. Working fingers only need apply. Preferably middle digits that have been used graphically on picket lines.
Not being a member of the working world, I am something of a loss when it comes to a topic such as this. It it does appear, however, that unions with a capital U have much more clout here than in in North America, where they have been decimated. Despite his increasing clout as a filmmaker and ballooning budgets, Michael Moore’s most powerful film is “Roger and Me,” which documents the devastation of of his hometown, Flint, Michigan, when General Motors moved its plant to Mexico.
Skilled, even unskilled workers in Australia have to be valued. There simply aren’t enough of them. Australia doesn’t share a porous border with a conveniently impoverished country, so it can’t count on cheap, expendable laborers to do the dirty work. To open up the country to willing workers from Asian countries would mean raising the red flag of immigration. We all know where that leads. One Pauline Hansen a decade may be more than enough, even for insular Australians.
But I’m getting off topic. Visibility and workplace safety are good things. When I am out on my recumbent bike in traffic I want to be seen by the driver on his mobile phone who may be completely oblivious to my presence. However, it does seem that the Workplace Safety people may have gone a bit overboard with the phosphorescent thing.
Could it be that the sheer numbers of workers wearing fluorescent clothing may, in fact, be having exactly the wrong effect, desensitizing the population through sheer overexposure? Can the collective retinal rods and cones of the Australian population absorb all this loud luminescence without tuning it out?
To me, grey flannel is starting to look good. Comments, anyone?
