Category: Australia

Categories
Australia

Aussiefication

So last night we headed for the Sun Theatre in Yarraville to see Mark Watson reading some passages from his new book, parts of which happen to be set in Melbourne. One of the many things he spoke about was his affection for this city and his plans one day to move over here. In answer to some further probing on the specifics of his migration plans during the audience Q&A (I think he was expecting questions about his book, but he seemed happy to answer it anyway…) he revealed that apparently there is a branch of the highly skilled migrant visa program through which comedians can get in to the country (and also that he knows all the words to Waltzing Matilda and has already picked an AFL team, which will probably do). I wonder if he’ll ever make it here permanently and whether it will live up to his high expectations when he does.

I took another big step in my own conversion this morning when I went to my appointment at VicRoads to swap that funny pink UK driving licence I have for the Aussie equivalent. The slightly inconsistent rules here state that you can drive for as long as you like on your overseas licence if you’re a temporary resident, but as soon as you become a permanent resident you have six months to swap your licence for the local equivalent. With that deadline about to expire at the end of this month it was time to take the plunge.

Luckily the UK sits on a short list of countries exempt from licence tests so the swap was nothing more than a bit of paperwork and identity verification. It took me long enough to pass my test in the UK in the first place, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the horror of having to do it all again (especially after two years of living here driving around in an automatic / forgetting how to drive a proper car / picking up all sorts of bad habits…)

Perhaps the only negative part of the whole process would be the fact that there is now a photo of me somewhere in the VicRoads computer system, which I have not yet seen but I will be carrying around with me for the next ten years. I don’t even want to think about how old I will be when this licence expires, so let’s hope it’s a good ‘un.

Still, add that to permanent residency and cross it off the list. Next stop citizenship. 2012.

Categories
Australia UK

Neither Here Nor There…

I was struck by a wave of nostalgia the other day, when my mid-afternoon-lull/boredom-alleviation strategy at work saw me tuning my iPhone to BBC 6 music, only to find Damon Albarn mid-way through a performance of his The Good, The Bad, And The Queen “concept album about modern life in London”, recorded at The Roundhouse in Camden in 2006.

Ah. 2006. When I used to live just down the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sitting at my desk on a dreary winter afternoon in rainy Melbourne wrestling with a cross-browser CSS issue, I was walking along the canal with Sal to Camden on a sunny summer day. Perhaps we were off for a pint of Fruli in the beer garden at the Edinboro Castle. Who Knows.

Of course I inevitably have a rose-tinted view of our past life–it’s easy to forget the freezing winter mornings and those commutes spent wedged into someone’s smelly armpits on a packed tube train that has just decided to hang around in a tunnel for a bit for no apparent reason–but regardless I miss the people and the places that we left behind.

Unbelievably it’s almost two years since we arrived in Australia (and now well over two years since we gave up our Marylebone flat and packed our London lives into 26 shipping boxes and a couple of rucksacks), and I began wondering how Australia has changed me (apart from the extra grey hairs, but I’m pretty sure they’d have sprouted regardless).

Clearly I’m still clinging to my old life in many ways–Private Eye turns up every two weeks to keep me informed about whatever hilarious japes those Coalition boys have been getting up to, and that VPN connection I signed up for gives me access to a certain online telly streaming service–but recently I’ve found that when I need a news fix I instinctively reach for www.theage.com.au before news.bbc.co.uk.

On the other hand, even after two years of living in this sports-mad, aussie rules obsessed city I’d still rather lose sleep to watch another depressing late night Everton result play out than sit through a whole AFL game. (And I won’t be losing sleep when the current season of that particular sport is over in a couple of weeks time, if only because it means that everyone will stop talking about it…)

Then again, with limited opportunities to expose myself to new British music, my Recently Added playlist is local bands all the way (a couple of notable exceptions aside).

So I find myself somewhat conflicted–no longer the person I was when we lived in London, but not quite a proper Australian yet. Still, there’s two years to go before I get to apply for this, so there’s plenty of time for that to change, whether I like it or not.

Categories
Australia Media Politics

Oh Look, The Alliance of Australian Retailers Got Hacked…

When I saw this ad on the TV earlier this evening, my first thought was that the “Alliance of Australian Retailers” (seen here campaigning against the Australian Labor government’s proposed introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes) would almost certainly turn out to be a front for some tobacco company…

…and of course it is, as The Age confirms (BAT, Philip Morris and Imperial, to be precise).

But then I went to their website, to read that “this campaign has ended”.

Really? That’s odd, I thought, given that I had just seen their ad on TV (and I spotted a massive billboard promoting their message just yesterday).

Even stranger, for a campaign supported by three tobacco companies, was the “What We Stand For” page, because apparently they stand for:

# Emphysema
# Coronary artery disease
# Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary disease
# Bladder and kidney cancer
# Stomach cancer
# Bronchitis
# Peripheral artery disease
# Acute myeloid leukemia
# Colorectal cancer
# Abdominal aortic aneurysm
# Kidney cancer
# Liver cancer
# Prostate cancer
# Pancreatic cancer
# Erectile dysfunction in men
# Pneumonia
# Cataracts
# Periodontitis
# Cervical cancer

Very true. But I wasn’t expecting quite that level of honesty from the tobacco giants… Were they planning a new direction of truth in advertising, I wondered?

Elsewhere the site told me that:

You can find links here to information about why smoking is bad, common smoking myths, and why Tobacco companies love to pose as Associations

I wondered if someone had set up a fake website to counteract the campaign, but, as the whois database confirms, www.australianretailers.com.au is indeed registered to the lobbying organisation behind the campaign (“The Civic Group”, a 10 employee company without much of a website of their own).

And then, as soon as I’d finished writing my post they were back on message, with the site reverting to the version I’d found in Google’s cache.

How very odd. I guess someone hacked into their website and made a few subtle changes. I wonder who was behind that little bit of internet japery (and how long it was live…)

Categories
Australia Politics

So This Guy Basically Runs Australia Now

I love a bit of politics, me. And normally I love elections. Give me a bit of round-the-clock, through-the-night, staying-with-it-till-the-results-are-in Dimbleby and I just can’t get enough of that coverage. I’ve stayed up through the night to watch the US elections unfolding before, and I happily had the BBC coverage running in the background at work as the results came in in the UK back in May.

But something about my first Aussie election left me a bit cold. Maybe it’s because although I’m a Permanent Resident here, live here, work here and pay my taxes, my lack of Aussie citizenship denies me the right to have a say in who gets to run the place (bit unfair, that, I reckon, given that Sal got to vote in the UK when we lived there, by virtue of having been born in the Commonwealth).

Or maybe it’s because the narrow range of issues that dominated the campaign seemed like issues so far removed from my own life, and the race to the bottom by two parties eager to tell the electorate what they thought they wanted to hear left me not really agreeing with either side (but just hoping whatever happened that the winner wasn’t going to be the budgie smuggling mad monk they call Tony Abbott…)

There was much discussion, for example, of “Boat People”, the unpleasant catch all term for refugees travelling overland to seek asylum in Australia. You wouldn’t know it from the predominant political narrative, but the places they arrive in Australia are really very, very far away from where most of the population of Australia lives and there are really very few of them–far, far less than the numbers of “plane people” who migrate here each year like I did, or the number of “womb people” who add to the population on a daily basis (although neither group rated a mention in this campaign for some reason). My own view (that all nations have a moral responsibility to be treating asylum seekers with dignity, rather than locking them up in offshore processing centres and treating them like criminals) unfortunately wasn’t one that was shared by either of the main parties, who competed between each other to tell this nation of immigrants how tough they’d be on these unfortunate new arrivals.

So I couldn’t get excited about this election at all. That was until it all changed on Saturday when things suddenly got interesting. Proving once again that this place just can’t help taking its cultural cues from the old dart, the voters of Australia, like their counterparts back in the UK, basically voted for no one.

Well, probably. As I understand it this thing is so close that it could be weeks before all the votes are counted, but what we do know is that no one won.

And since neither party will get the magic 76 seats it needs to form a majority government, they’ll need to sign up the 3 nutjob independent MPs and one greens MP (who unseated the Labor incumbent here in Melbourne) who have suddenly been thrust into the spotlight as kingmakers…

So, in essence, this guy now runs Australia:

Bob’s on the job. We live in interesting times indeed…

Categories
Australia Football Shoddy Journalism

Australians Know Their Football

Some more quality fact checking from The Age, today, where I spotted this in their “Complete Guide to South Africa 2010”:

England?

I must have missed the announcement that the home nations have now begun competing as a single unified team, under the Union Flag. I hope The Age’s knowledgeable football writers have informed the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Football Associations that they will no longer be required.

I guess it does solve that old problem about us never being able to send a team to play football at the Olympics, though, hey…

Categories
Australia Politics Religion

“…you’re a parliamentarian, in Australia, who believes that the world you live in is less than 10,000 years old…?”

An absolute pleasure, last night, while flicking through the small selection of terrestrial channels we have to choose from here in Australia, past the uninspiring Oscars coverage and dull US drama imports, to stumble across Richard Dawkins on Q and A, the ABC’s local version of Question Time.

If you watch this clip from the start of the show, you may be struck as I was by the gulf between Dawkins and the rest of the guests–juxtaposed with someone who can speak so articulately, the politicians on the panel seem spectacularly incapable of stringing a coherent argument together to explain their daft beliefs.

Steve Fielding, sitting to Dawkins’ left, came across particularly poorly by contrast, I thought.

People voted for this man?

Now I know that voting is compulsory here in Australia so it’s not like anyone went the extra mile out of their way to elect him, but do you really mean to tell me that there were choices and people chose him over the other candidates? Who was he up against?

[I see from his website that he’s also a Climate Change Denier, which is nice–I still don’t quite get how anyone in Australia can deny climate change. It’s a little bit like the turkeys voting for Christmas, because if there’s anywhere that’s going to bear the brunt of the increasingly extreme wacky weather we have to look forward to as a result of screwing up the planet, it’s surely Australia…]

Categories
Australia

The Day We Bought The Bank A House

27th February 2010: We Bought A (Blurry) House There’s a well thumbed copy of a book called Everything You Need To Know (But Forget To Ask) When Buying Or Selling Property sitting on the table beside my bed. According to the book it is not uncommon to wake up the day after you buy a house thinking “oh god, what have we done?”

Buyer’s Remorse, they call it.

Maybe this will set in later, but on Sunday morning–the day after we bought the bank a house–the first thought to enter my head was not one of remorse but amazement. “I can’t believe I bought a house at auction yesterday!” I thought to myself when I woke up, with a grin.

It’s certainly an odd way to buy a house. Although Australia-wide there are plenty of houses bought and sold by private sale, in Melbourne (and inner Melbourne at that) the vast majority of property changes hands through public auctions right there in the street outside the house, just like on Neighbours that time when they sold Mrs Mangel’s or Number 30 or whichever one it was.

Saturday was a big day for us–with the place we were interested in going under the hammer at 1pm, we got some practice in by attending three other auctions beforehand that morning. None of these were houses we wanted to buy, but I had previously been inside all of them and thought it would be a good idea to get in the right mindset for the job ahead, and pick up a couple of tactics from some of the other bidders (although as we were advised by Sal’s sister earlier in the week the only tactic that really works every time is “have more money than everyone else”–I’m not sure that’s necessarily something you can pick up in a morning).

We weren’t the only people who had turned up just to watch, though. At our second auction of the day, in Yarra Street in Abbotsford, The Age had sent a photographer and Channel Nine had sent a reporter and cameraman to interview one of the agents and film people shouting out numbers in the street. Clearly a slow news day in Melbourne.

As I Twittered at the time, I had to resist the strongest of urges to run past the interview being filmed beforehand shouting “Eddie McGuire‘s a Prick!” Somehow I managed to keep this childish thought to just myself and anyone who might be following my twitter stream or facebook status…

By the time our one came round, any confidence I might have had earlier in the week had well and truly gone, as we’d seen all three properties sell for well over their advertised price and well over our budget. Still, we headed over to the house and took up a position over the road in amongst a crowd of about 50 or so people spread along the street, and waited for what seemed like an age as the minutes counted down to 1pm.

In the end it proved to be remarkably easy to spend more money than I have ever spent on a single thing in my entire life (most of which I don’t even have). There was a point just before I entered the bidding when I was suddenly struck by the fear that I wouldn’t be able to say the words (what if I opened my mouth and nothing came out? what if I let someone else buy it for less money than we were prepared to pay just because I didn’t get in a bid in time?) but luckily I hadn’t lost the power of speech and I managed to yell out (possibly a little too loudly–I think a lady to my left gasped when I shouted the amount) a number a couple of thousand dollars above the current bid. And once I was in there was nothing to it–by that point there was only one other bidder left and we were only going up in $1,000 increments, at some way under what we were prepared to pay for the place, so it was quite easy to just keep nodding my head and putting it back onto the other bidders. We were competing against an older couple who we later found out were buying for their daughter. Every time the bid went back to them the wife would shake her head as if that was it for them, but then after a pause the husband would bid again. But then they reached their limit and stopped, and after the longest pause of the day so far, (“are we all done? is there anyone else? any more bids…?”) a small piece of Collingwood (a much underrated but very central suburb bordered by cool Smith Street and close to Brunswick Street) was ours. *

Still can’t believe it, though.

* By which I mean we bought 10% of it. It might be ours in 2035, if we’re lucky…

Categories
Australia Trains

Plus Ca Change…

I’ve never quite understood the logic behind rail privatisation.

Privatisation in general I semi get. You take some service that was previously provided by a single organisation–the state–and sell it off, thus generating a nice cash windfall for the government and in a handy bi-product you open that service up to competition, which should theoretically mean that the customers get a better service.

That’s great if it means I don’t have to take my phone service from Telstra or BT, and I can shop around for a great deal on my gas and electricity, but unfortunately private companies are driven by the need to make money, not provide a good service to their customers. If there’s no competition to force them to provide a decent service, then they’ll pursue profit over all else, every time.

And so it is with the railways: apart from some pathetically minimal service obligations that will have been written into the contract, there’s really nothing to encourage a train operating company to do anything other than the bare minimum they need to keep their franchise. It’s not as if passengers can choose to use a competing train company to get where they need to be, after all.

Here in Melbourne we’ve just swapped the widely loathed Connex, who’ve been running the trains for the last 10 years, for Hong Kong’s MTR.

We have the same drivers, the same station staff, the same track and the same ageing rolling stock, but it costs $25 Million to repaint all the trains and give the station staff natty new uniforms. Sure, the government has a new scapegoat to blame when things go wrong, but I can’t see the value in that for me as a customer.

When things go wrong, we even have the same person to tell us about it (well, I’m guessing that Metro spokeswoman Lanie Harris is some relation of Connex spokeswoman Lanie Harris).

Last night I got to spend a fun 45 minutes to an hour hanging around at the station staring at a non moving train as I attempted to get home.

The great new system appears to be that we still have the same delays, but there is now an announcement every five minutes telling you that there is a delay. And that no one knows when the delay will be resolved. About five different people will compete to make these announcements, sometimes giving conflicting information.

The other innovation is a small army of uniformed customer service chaps patrolling the platforms, but I wasn’t sure what the point of them was, as they didn’t appear to have any information–every time a customer asked something they would just read the answer off the screen on the platform, or repeat whatever the most recent announcement had said. I for one am glad we’re paying for them to be there to provide that useful service.

Categories
Australia

Some Of My Best Friends Are Australians…

Two polar opposite comedy experiences last night–Sal and I spent a lovely evening out in Melbourne town watching the excellent Daniel Kitson’s musings on life and death. It was a wonderful, uplifting hour and a half of intelligent, life-affirming comic joy.

Meanwhile, Australian network television was casually winding the clock back to 1972 with some good old fashioned racism.

The comments on the story on The Age website — that would be the supposedly more liberal of our two local Melbourne newspapers — make particularly depressing reading: the overwhelming reaction appears somehow not to be “how the hell did this make it on air?” and “isn’t it a deeply embarrassing reflection of modern Australian culture that anyone could possibly think this was acceptable?” as I might have expected most sane people to react, this being the 21st century and all that, but rather people actually seem to be defending it.

Jesus Christ! I mean I know that there’s plenty of right-wing racist fuckwits back in the UK (I only have to look at spEak You’re bRanes if I need reminding of that), but I was sort of hoping my adopted home might be a bit more enlightened. Apparently not…

Categories
Australia Media Shoddy Journalism

Headline Fail

Headline: Police grill 3yo boys

Courtesy of yesterday’s mX, the shabby Murdoch freesheet that is distributed at train stations in Melbourne, comes this gem of a headline: “Police grill 3yo boys”.

Really mX? Are you sure? I prefer to use a BBQ myself for my cannibalistic needs, but those crazy police will try anything, won’t they…