Attacks on international students are again making headlines. While opportunistic assaults on Indians in Melbourne have faded into the memory of the past few years, the latest reports of attacks in Sydney are… how to put it delicately… beyond belief. In April, a group of six teenagers set upon two Chinese students on recommendation from another scared passenger. “Rob them. They are Asian. They are rich.”¹

If that weren’t enough, one of the female attackers removed a used tampon and stuffed it in a victim’s mouth. I am literally struggling to leave those words on the page, but that’s what the report says. After finishing the powerful opinion article I couldn’t help but compare with my own history overseas. Contrast is an understatement.

From my first night in the darkest streets of Los Angeles to diverse experiences in South East Asia, I’ve not once felt fear in the sense author Shuting Dong elicits. I’ve been scared, sure, but never through anyone’s fault but mine. Getting belligerently drunk, passing out on the street and then going exploring in the city of Bangkok at night is pretty obviously the wrong way to go. Maybe I’ve been lucky, too, given the recklessness of escapades past. But does European descent really have anything to do with it?

I used to believe it was a generational thing – my generation has been socialised into diversity. It’s literally unavoidable, and any serious arguments of the nature that “all races are not equal” disappeared from the western world a long, long time ago. But the kids on that train were just that – kids. Teenagers, to be more precise. It’s surprisingly easy to be abusive through ignorance when you’re young, but it shouldn’t be that easy. That said, if anyone’s got a way to improve and instil responsibility for one’s actions in such wayward youth, I’ll support it.

As for the “rich” comment, so lovingly offered by a fellow passenger in distress, it’s a shame we’re back there. It’s such a loaded and subjective term that shouldn’t be used by anyone. It implies judgements about personal circumstances that nobody should feel qualified to make, despite Gillard and Swan’s serious attempts.² If you want to draw an arbitrary line in the income tables and actively dislike everybody on or above that line, feel free, but I’m at a loss to think of anything more counterproductive, pointless, even. I thought life was about creating and spreading opportunity and the freedom to pursue your dreams. When did the goal regress to petty class war? If someone generates wealth, and does it well, we should not attack them but learn from them so that more of us may reach the middle class and beyond.

So I’m here to say no matter where you’re from, don’t stop earning when you get to $150,000. Create, reinvest and recreate that prosperity so that as a nation and a region, we might all benefit. Come here to learn and bask in opportunity, and bring your family. The greater the variety, the greater the synergistic opportunities in culture and technology, with flow-on financial benefits to boot. And if we strive to make our cities an international experience, then as a population we’re probably less likely to travel elsewhere in the world. Why would you, when the culture is right here at home, just waiting to be exploited by the tourism industry? Local jobs, ahoy! Everybody literally wins. Don’t let reports like the one mentioned here stop you from leaving your apartment after 9, else the terrorists have already won.

And for those of us comfortable in our European descent, we have to ditch this unproductive garbage – it makes us look like a nation of haters and fools to the rest of the world. Call it vanity, but it matters if we want other nations on this planet to contribute to our way of life. We already know there will be no help from our Prime Minister in this regard, but that doesn’t mean we have to follow her example by picking and choosing which demographics we fight for. Nobody would feel any better if we eliminated the “upper class” and stopped striving anyway. Take this from the guy who lives on bread, cereal and Mi Goreng, soon to be crawling back in to the nest because he can’t afford the rent.

P.S. Happy birthday, Cait Whelan! Your gift will be some days late.

P.P.S.

I discovered Parks & Recreation recently. A mockumentary television show in the style of The Office, I watched with great interest as the team of misfits ran a government department. A long-time ambition of mine has been to run for office, but after 7 ½ years at university and no private sector experience outside of retail that’s not about to happen. As a backup I’ll have degrees in Arts and Business (eventually), but working for the government is perhaps the logical-next-step down the ladder.

Then I met Ron Swanson. He operates from a position of leadership, is well-versed in outdoor sports and hates big government. He’s also an unstoppable carnivore, believes in unfettered freedom of religion and is, at heart, libertarian in just about every way. He’s a minor hero of mine, despite being an invention of Michael Schur, Greg Daniels and Nick Offerman for televisual entertainment purposes¹. Despite moral opposition to pretty much every government initiative, he swallows his pride, lives his life and runs the Parks Department for a bankrupt city council.

He got me to thinking. Unfettered liberty is an unrealistic proposition in the 21^st century. Public safety / health / morals have long since taken over as a primary focus of government. Partly a result of modern political marketing and a 24-hour news cycle with immense focus on society’s “losers,” liberty has been suppressed in the public debate. Unless you’re talking about economic liberty, which is somehow completely divorced from social liberty. Ironic, given that the economic realm is an entirely social construction. Enter The Greens.

I might be overcrediting here, but I’ve used their position as the third force in Australian politics to come up with a new two-dimensional political scale. Why? Because I’m dissatisfied with being called right wing on account of being a freedom fighter. There are also many people who value social liberty on the so-called “left”. A sliding scale is no longer adequate to describe complex moral positions. This is yet another feat of modern marketing techniques – breaking down demographics into increasingly smaller portions through offerings of customisation.² There are numerous issues where a person’s moral code might cause conflict with their preferred position, yet we’re all given a single measly vote. Both major parties are fairly socially conservative, preferring to massage societal outcomes in a particular way and let the economy do its thing. The greens, however, differ on drugs policy and are averse to imprisonment for a number of offences that are currently imprisonable – in fact, it’s number three on their list of justice priorities.³ While more likely due to misguided compassion than respect for freedom, the outcome in many circumstances is the same. Obviously, conflicts arise when environmental outcomes are pursued in certain ways, or with attemps to silence a free press. But in parties as with people, conflicts are inevitable. Nonetheless, I’ve placed the major Australian parties on a simple X-Y chart depicting the balance between economic communalism and individualism on one axis, and social authority and liberty on another. This is my way of addressing the false dichotomy between economic and social issues as they’ve played out in political history.

Yes, there’s plenty of further examples on Google (there’s plenty of everything there) and most are probably better, but this is a graph of the situation as it stands in Australia. Again, it’s a big call to assume the Greens have cemented third place, but there is clearly room in politics for the views they espouse, and our democracy should respect that. It actually excites me. That’s a pretty big hole in the market, one that Swanson can’t fill alone. Apart from being roughly where I see myself, it’s partially filled at the fringes by the Shooters and Fishers Party, with two NSW upper house seats and the Liberal Democrats, who don’t get much of a show. But, just as the Greens have ever-so-slowly inched towards the political centre (conventional and two-dimensional) as they increase their primary vote, so too there may be room for an economically liberal party that views freedom as integral to its soul, without relying on religious history for moral guidance. It’d take an extreme amount of money and even more discipline to pull off, and the Liberal Party could easily fill the gap just enough to ward off competition. The major parties aren’t used to competition that’s not from each other, and I think that weakness brings many possibilities to the governance of the nation.

P.S. Based on that chart… I’d say The Nationals would be better off with the Labor Party.

Australia is a lucky country. But it’s a double-edged sword – our status as one of the biggest island-nations in the world has seriously stemmed the flow of culture and diversity, despite the best efforts of the gold rush and various other population booms. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is both the cause and effect of our fearful isolationism, our stubborn refusal to accept or integrate any minority and our pig-headed belief in our own methods. I don’t expect this to be easy for any Australian to swallow, but you can’t begin to appreciate the magnitude of the situation until experiencing something like North America.

The most prominent event to this extend, the one that lingers in my mind as I write this, is the recent debacle that erupted over Kraft’s decision to label Vegemite as Halal-friendly. I recall a significant percentage of Herald Sun readers voted that Vegemite should not be labeled Halal. Why? I guess the obvious answer is that it is a decision based around pandering to minorities, one of our pet hates. But I want to focus on exactly why it is that we hate putting in any sliver of effort or change to suit another “culture.” Is it because our culture is somehow superior to all others? Doubtful, since pretty much everybody in the developed world has at some stage come from Europe, Africa or Asia. Any individual identity that we like to believe we have created is merely a modified derivative of these. In our case it’s mostly European. Is it because we are at heart an incredibly conservative and insecure nation; do we not actually believe our cultural identity will be able to survive once the salt and pepper have been sprinkled throughout? Perhaps, as I’m sure there are elements of Australian society who would rather not have their own little world impinged on in any way, shape or form for fear of the invading culture taking over, but this is hardly valid. Nobody gets rid of their dog because their new neighbour has allergies, and living on the same street as a Muslim or Jew doesn’t mean you personally have to stop eating bacon and pork.

This is where that insecurity turns ugly, and morphs into some sort of weird, quasi-racist defensive hatred. Language allows us to communicate efficiently and effectively, yet a simple difference can throw up insurmountable barriers. Why is it that we expect multi-lingual peoples to speak only English and forgo their native tongue? Why is the onus on them to forget, rather than us to learn? Having just spent my first night in Quebec after a long drive through Ontario, and after learning 9 or so years of French in school, I found myself linguistically disabled in a foreign land. I rarely paid attention in foreign-language classes, falling into the trap of thinking everyone would be speaking English soon enough.

Maybe they will – even if it’s purely a “business decision,” so to speak, much of the world’s population will need English language skills to get a job in a global economy. But that’s not excuse, and indeed it may be an equally business-like decision to learn Asian and Pacific languages. But we’d first need to learn to open up a little. More people = more cultures, bigger markets, infinite opportunities. It’s not a threat. It’s time some of the fearful and paranoid in Australia realised as much.

We arrived in Michigan last night, crashing in the carpark of a run-down bowl-a-rama, awakening to brutal sunshine and traffic. No run-ins with the law though, which at this stage is a bonus. We’ve been “moved on” several times from public parks – fair enough, our personal hygiene is beginning to wane. It’s pretty nice countryside up here, in fact it almost reminds me a little of the Mornington Peninsula, which for all its flaws is a chilled-out, largely friendly place to reside. At this stage I have no idea where we’re headed, or for that matter where exactly we’ve come from, but we’re in the parking lot of the local WalMart. We picked up some killer CDs today too, courtesy of yet another local pawn shop. CCR, The Darkness and Boston ought to keep us in good hands, at least until we reach Canada. Not having heard any of Boston’s work but for More Than A Feeling, though, it’s hard to say with any certainty. I do have a little faith in 80s rock, however.

Wisconsin… where to start. You lured me in with promises of small town communities with nothing to do, and holy shit, you delivered and then some. After having our car searched whilst looking for a place to crash just north of Milwaukee, we ended up sleeping out the front of someone’s house in a military neighbourhood. After once again waking to gobfuls of blazing sunshine, I ferried us to the local rotary park by the marina in search of cool waters. Surprisingly enough it was here that we were enlisted as guest stars in a real-life episode of That 70s Show.

I made a half-assed attempt to bathe myself in what turned out to be the freezing-cold lake Michigan, and after Bryan managed to successfully lose his first item of the day (the scissors, in the lake) we set about tuning our stereo setup for a better, more road-trip-worthy sound. We succeeded to fanfare, meeting a local fisherman and two young dudes walking the dog. We ran into them again up the road buying cigarettes, at which point they invited us back to their place to hang out. Without hesitation, we accepted.

They turned out to be great people doing it tough. We heard first-hand stories on the economic woe that is the USA right now, with part-time work and youth unemployment hurting people everywhere. But hanging out in their basement with a bunch of guys and gals added a new dimension to our road trip. Dipping tobacco, radar detectors and an exceedingly generous donation of food – need I say more? They offered us shelter and showers but (somewhat to our own disgust) we declined in order to efficiently attend to our enormous itinerary. Insect clouds, bulk cigarettes and Canada await.

Our journey south on route 90 held the first of the hiccups we were to have with the car. Just south of Fresno, we pulled over in a rather precarious position on an offramp to get our bearings, turning the key not 2 minutes later to a dead battery. To make things interesting, we’d neglected to buy phone credit. We were pretty well screwed. Walking off the freeway into the nearby neighbourhood, we quickly realised we weren’t in the best part of town, and wandered around asking every business (almost closed by this time) that looked loosely affiliated with the automotive industry for a battery. Given that for some strange reason gas stations over here seem to make better business selling booze over car stuff, this was our ace in the hole, as the owner of the local tyre store came past just as we began a mile-long walk to AutoZone, offering us a lift there and back.

Trusting strangers had only led to the injury of my companion’s pride and wallet thus far, and I, always the sceptic, was pretty sure it was going to happen again. When he dropped us off claiming he’d “be back in 20,” my natural assumption was that he was going to take his buddies down to the ramp, leave the car on blocks and us destitute. Fortunately (and somewhat ironically, given the gentleman’s preaching of Jesus on the return trip) Bryan’s faith in humanity proved the victor over my skepticism, and he returned to pick us up as the rain and darkness set in. Picking his employee up on the way, he took us back to our car and even gave us a hand getting the old battery out and the new one in, not that it would have been necessary. Offering the old battery and much gratitude for their services, we were finally away once again. Crisis averted. Narrowly.

That allowed us to continue our journey towards Vegas, via Death Valley. I piloted the van through an almost-blizzard, a new and epic experience for me, but we made it to a parking lot and set up camp under cover of darkness.

Unsurprisingly it was pretty steamy in the van when we woke up, the cold-night-hot-day contrast being one of Death Valley’s specialties. It’s not as exciting as it’s made out to be though, and after long periods of driving through nothing and some brief sightseeing stops we were in Nevada.

It’s funny how the slightest change in basic philosophy can alter everything you’ve built your system of moral values on. It’s as if everything I’ve been working loosely towards in the past few years, all the little pieces I’ve decided I want to base a future on are somehow invalid. This place has left me with more questions than answers. Even clichéd questions like “how much freedom is too much?” have me baffled. Can you really be a liberal in every sense of the word, yet further environmental goals? Bureaucracy has been my pet hate throughout my university career, and is part of the reason I figured I could bring something to the table of Australian politics. The U.S.A., for all its flaws, I guess was supposed to fill my experiential void with regard to the balance of freedom and responsibility.

While there are clear-cut differences between Australia (at least from the Victorian perspective) and the States, I’ve come to believe it is at least partly the result of a parliamentary system unable to achieve change. Whether or not America’s forefathers designed the constitution with the threat of future generations of red tape in the back of their mind is a matter of contention, but what’s left more than 200 years later is a country built on the simple principle of economic (and to a lesser extent, social) liberty. Notice banners lining the highways at the limit of every town on the freeway, unhindered by visual pollution restrictions of the local council. High speed limits and a driving system where the onus is almost completely on the pilot of the vehicle. And of course, Vegas, which needs no explanation. These are minute examples in the context of a world superpower, and there are many very obvious exceptions. But in my eyes, it’s the little differences like these that exude a generally “freer” culture.

Answers are harder to come by than cities in Wyoming. Seems like it’s back to the drawing board for career, future, pretty much everything for me, but I’m still going to enjoy the shit out of this trip and bring home with me as much of this culture of freedom as possible. I’ll most likely fall straight back into the trap of whingeing about speeding fines and government decisions as soon as I get home, but hey, that’s a whole world away.

Speaking of the future, after an amazing smokey barbeque in the hills of Marin County, I settled in to the last bed I’d enjoy for a long time and did some social networking. I somehow spent hours chatting to Cait, whom I’d only actually met once, but if Druce was right about anything it was that she’s a cool chick. Despite my up-in-the-clouds state of mind, I was pretty sure I connected with her, on a musical level if nothing else. Music has been a weird thing for me ever since the band incidents, and in the last 5 years there’s been pretty much no one for me to share ideas and influences with, to broaden my horizons. There is of course my fellow traveler, whom I can’t thank enough for some of the best Australian hip-hop and alternative stuff I’ve ever heard, but I still like to think of myself as a bit of a rock-child. I was often flying solo when it came to tunes.

That is not to suggest in any way that music can only really be appreciated in a group-think situation, amongst the masses. While that may be the case with pop (to which, I might add, I am also not averse) there is something soothing about kicking back with a classic tune that defines a certain period of your life. That’s how it is for me, anyway. Songs function almost like a smell in this respect; there’s nothing like a bit of The Strokes to remind me of a time when I was engrossed in guitar and music and saw the worst side of those closest to me, or some Billy Joel to remind me of my very first camping trip with Dad and indeed the first record I ever owned. Turns out Cait’s actually seen Billy Joel in concert. Coincidence? I’ll add that to the list of questions raised yet unanswered.

And now, back to the future.

The DMV proved a piece of cake. The guy let us off so many missing forms, let us off the immediate requirement for a smog check and gave us tags for about $160. Turns out the seller basically had no idea what he was doing with “lien” sales. Either way, we could finally breathe easy now that we were actually driving a registered car. A comforting thought as we crossed the Richmond bridge into Oakland. We hit up the Blue Sky Coffee Shop and were away. We headed south on California Route 90, before sporadically deciding that we would spend the evening in Yosemite. Facing clear skies and babbling brooks on the way in, we awoke to pouring rain that descended quickly into full on snow. The first time I’d actually seen snow fall. Cliché? Yes, but somehow still special. In fact, we almost found ourselves either snowed in or leaving $50 lighter with chains. Fortunately we managed to tail a snowplow and wove our way down the mountain and onwards.

Finally, a chance to do a little writing! Things have been so hectic the past few days it’s hard to know where to begin, so I figure I’ll just go from where I left off in Inglewood.

She didn’t pick up the phone. It killed me a little, despite my own repeated pleas to not get hopes up. So often are we let down in the area of motor vehicle sales that I try not to let any glimmer of hope into my mind at all. But, it happened, and I did, and we failed.

Plan B came out swinging, though. Without any other real option we opted for a white 1991 Chevy Astro, the only other car with whose owner we had managed to have a positive conversation. Turned out they were both in Long Beach so one way or another, we had a long way to travel via more creative means. The receptionist at the hostel counter suggested a shuttle to “the green line” rather than a cab as we’d save about $50. We took her up on the offer, and after shaking the bus-token-peddlers on the train and lugging our shit down the stairs, we sat under the freeway, basically praying for a cab. After frantically ringing my only contact in the U.S. for the cab number, failing and running out my phone credit in the process, I convinced my sidekick to call the guy we were getting the van from.

He actually offered to have his “mechanic” come and pick us up. No way we were going to let that one get away, so we waited under the freeway in what turned out to be Lynwood, just north of Compton. Not ideal, but we got the van, didn’t we? It actually came with a free tour of Long Beach, culminating in a brief stop at the vista on Signal Hill. Small oil derricks literally next door to expensive-looking estate houses are not something I imagine you’d see anywhere else.

I was first to take the helm, and after trying to navigate the DMV car park to no avail, we jumped on the 405 and headed straight for Marina del Rey.

At 5pm.

In Los Angeles.

Anyway it turned out to be nothing the M1 wasn’t capable of and the left hand drive thing came pretty easily, so we made it to the Marina for a shop in the fading daylight, then caught the last of the sunset over Venice Beach. Things got very, very interesting as we went for a stroll along the promenade. It turns out the “doctor” was in at muscle beach, and for a small price we were given a license to smoke pot.

That’s right, a license. Photo ID and all. To ingest cannabis. In America. Yeah, I was pretty stunned, too, especially since we practically stumbled across it, and well outside of business hours. After filing the paperwork and being given a brief introduction to how the system works, we rolled into the hash bar for some Dragon, with a take-home-triple of Purple AK-47, Pure Kush and the precariously titled Chem Doggy Dizzle. Unfortunately the hash bar beat the living shit out of our lungs, and we were left the fools in coughing fits on the floor.

One thing’s certain: we were blazed by the time we reached the van. Now, however, it was pitch black and we were completely boxed in by some bitch behind us – probably just as well. Hours went by trying everything from stabs at the accelerator to one of us pushing whilst the other one steered. It would have been where we slept had the woman behind us not returned in the wee-hours and pissed off just as we were about to give up.

Then Hollywood. Oh, Hollywood. Probably one of the most well known suburbs in the world, and it swallowed us whole. It’s not exactly a complex of weaving and winding streets (in fact they are pretty much a simple grid) but we drove up and down Santa Monica Boulevard looking for a way to Sunset Boulevard for about 2 hours. We never found it.

On our mission to papparazise Danny Devito at his Malibu mansion, we found a police officer parked out front. We hightailed it to a secluded spot in the mountains and pulled off the road for some well-earned rest.

Santa Barbara was everything it was cracked up to be and the Big Sur was a pretty awesome place to camp for the night, but after settling in at Al’s in Kentfield, we were dealt a crushing blow to our thus-far perfect luck. The cheap SDHC card in my handycam decided to cark it right about the time I passed out on that huge night in Inglewood (coincidence?). We discovered this while trying to view some of the footage on the fourth evening. However disheartening it might have been, there was dick-all we could do about it, and after gracious assistance from Christine in washing some clothes, we continued our journey onwards. Next stop: the DMV. Ugh.

We rocked up at the hostel just after sunset. Got upgraded to a suite for some reason, $17 for a room next to LAX is un-fucking-believable… Although it wasn’t exactly the brightest neighbourhood. Hooked up some “fortys” at the servo down the road and nearly got jacked by some crackheads, placating them with one of Bryan’s $10 bills. Scary stuff! He did get laid though, which I thought was a pretty good effort for day one. So fucking hungover right now. Fuck.

I have to be in Compton soon. Pimpin’ van on 20s lined up, provided this chick actually picks up the phone. Then, we ride.

As the adversarial title implies, there’s always two sides to a bitter tale such as this. If you haven’t been to hospital (or read a paper) lately, our nurses have been engaged in intense industrial warfare with the Victorian state government. So far it’s been like watching a kid with a spoon try and get blood from a stone, with the Liberal government cynically and stubbornly offering less than half of what other public servants are getting, like the 4.75 per cent per year it gave to state police.¹ To date they haven’t budged an inch (or cent), and seem content to wait for Fair Work Australia to settle the matter. This, despite the fact that the latest ‘human right’ seems to be to have your wages rise above the rate of inflation (never mind that doing just that exacerbates inflation), but that’s not what seems to be upsetting the nurses’ union. Apparently it’s those evil “efficiency dividends”; the government’s desire to have “health assistants” do the more menial tasks of the nurses, thereby reducing the level of skills wastage as nurses themselves focus on more important tasks, like looking after the patient.²

Anyone seriously claiming that Victorian nurses don’t deserve a pay rise should probably exit the debate right here. Public hospitals (at least we have them) have never been “fully funded,” and no matter which tier of government ends up in charge, I doubt they ever will be. The West Wing’s pun that health is a “black hole” holds true when it comes to political capital, whether we’re willing to admit it or not. Results tend to be framed as a reduced rate of failure rather than an actual improvement in service delivery – find a news article from the last 10 years, where we’ve had a variety of governments in charge at different levels, that praises the leaps and bounds we’ve made in public health management. Or education, or infrastructure, or welfare. There aren’t any, because they don’t happen. Changes or new funding injections tend to come incrementally, in the form of incomplete (and usually unrealistic) promises; think federal Labor’s GP “super-clinics” or the state Liberals’ election pledge to make our teachers the most “highly paid in the nation.”³ If education wasn’t so important to the future of the entire planet, I’d have pissed myself laughing when they made that one.

Nurses themselves perform a variety of tasks. They administer drugs, provide assistance in surgery and do a great deal of secretarial work in the hospital. In fighting for a significant pay rise yet clinging to these lower-order tasks, the union’s arguments begin to lose traction with the public. Typical of all unions (and it should be said, many nurses outside the Australian Nurses Federation are just as deserving of a better wage) the nurses’ union relentlessly pursues the interests of its members, sometimes at the expense of other segments of society. Remember, every extra dollar for a nurse is one less dollar for a road or train, for a police vehicle or for the construction of actual hospitals. In a well-balanced democracy like ours, this lobbying is, for the most part, a good thing, especially when it comes to so-called “caring” professions dominated by women and characterised by low wages – nursing, childcare, disability support.

But I fear this union, whose public tone has become increasingly (and ironically) aggressive, has taken that inevitable step too far. A billboard overlooking the M1 has a picture of a pouty nurse bordered by the phrase “They’re putting lives at risk for the sake of a dollar.” Brushing over the fact that the money being fought over is more than “a dollar,” when I first laid eyes on it I actually thought it was a retaliatory ad from the government trying to win back some public opinion after the union’s illegal closure of beds.

After reading the fine print (Authorised by the Australian Nurses Federation, Victoria) it struck me: this argument goes both ways. As I prepare to receive hate mail from many of my nurse friends, let me pose a question: Isn’t shutting down wards, working slowly and refusing to perform overtime duties doing just as much to put lives at risk as the state government’s paltry 2.5 per cent-a-year offer? At least the government is offering something; they’re not childishly revoking shifts and firing people in anger, mirroring the union’s current behaviour. Let’s be frank for a moment: both sides here are fighting over money, but only nurses get to claim the high ground because they’re in the health industry.

It’s an industry that is starting to sound pretty elitist and exclusive, too: while the nurses fight for the right to do all the secretarial paperwork they want at an increased rate of pay (efficiency gains? No takers?), the Australian Medical Association fights to make sure safe and easy-to-use medication can’t be dispensed without a GP’s permission.⁴ Because apparently nurses, chemists, pharmacists and many other intelligent people are simply incapable of comprehending the interactions between mind, body and substance. But your GP can. They’re smarter / can use Google better than everyone else. Even radiographers are hard at it, fighting nurses for the right to X-ray patients.⁵ Bit (pa)maternal, don’t you think?

Most people in medicine – yes, pharmacists, nurses AND doctors – are great people willing to help just about anyone, regardless of office hours. But whilst public health is an important social issue, it’s also an industry. Workers in hospitals have no more right to more money from their boss than an army sergeant, janitor or a volunteer firefighter. Ultimately, every worker adds value to society, they just contribute in different ways at different times. Yes, we’d all like our nurses to be paid top-notch and have this reflected in their job performance (Most gallantly act like they already are), but the union and those fighting on its behalf need to shed the holier-than-every-other-worker attitude that their campaign has, at times, reeked of. They’d definitely be able to win over the rest of the public, and who knows, maybe even the Liberal government would come to the table.

P.S. Let’s hope they do – this dispute costs the state, the nurses (no pay rises at all until it’s sorted) and anyone in need of medical treatment. A big lose-lose-lose situation. Needs to be dealt with.

We’ve all heard the phrase “not in my back yard.”¹ It’s been applied to nuclear power, transport infrastructure… in fact, it’s useful in almost any urban development context. It well describes Victoria’s prevailing attitude towards altering the visual landscape in just about any way.

A good example is the redevelopment of Camberwell station. Parts of the old station will be modified to accommodate a 10-storey apartment complex, with shops to be added along the overpass à la South Yarra.² The flats were to be built directly above the station – the perfect place for high-density, inner-suburban living.

That started in 2004. The project is only just beginning – construction hasn’t even started as of a few weeks ago. This is in no small part thanks to a well-orchestrated campaign by the locals, with acting legend Geoffrey Rush at the helm.³ They claimed the project was a “monstrous iceberg” that would destroy a heritage site in the name of profit and progress. While the architecture leaves a little to be desired, it’s easy to overlook the fact that profit and progress are the only reasons these structures were built in the first place. Not to mention there’s an equally out-of-place “iceberg” just down the road. Almost any new building is bound to look a little odd when it’s surrounded by old-school Victorian shops.

Look out at the modern suburbs on the far edges of Melbourne. Many have sprung up on landfill, to accommodate the two or three million that don’t stand a chance against inner-Melbourne’s impenetrable property market. McMansions and highways litter these suburbs, the newest of which appear strangely barren of plant life. With Rush and the Camberwell crowd sitting on the million-dollar acres around the city, what other option is there?

But I’m a capitalist, and have no right to complain about the effects of an open property market (we’ll deal with negative gearing and capital gains taxation later). The fact is the closer you get to any city, anywhere in the world, the more expensive it is. It only becomes a serious problem when residents of inner suburbs band together to lock in the heritage and lock out expansion, i.e. new residents. Thus, the low density virus spreads while inner suburbanites castigate the outer suburbanites for not using public transport, which, by the way, is easy when you’re literally surrounded by a grid of public transport routes.

So inner-suburban development is halted, sky-high property values are cemented and the rest of us are forced hours out of the city. They have their suburb just the way they like it, so why open the doors to any potentially cashed-up new bogans? New traffic in the area was a major complaint about the development, yet completely misses the point of a building on a train station, with a tram stop at the front door. With no decent east-west road route nearby, it’s simply not where you’d live if you preferred driving.

No doubt many of us are reluctant for certain elements of our home town to change, especially if they have heritage significance. But every building has a story, and to bar projects that will allow more people to call a place home like we all do is a selfish attitude.

The NIMBY attitude has also forced transport corridors underground. Residents from Ringwood and beyond pay $2.48 for just over 2km of tollway travel on a road that otherwise has “the cheapest car tolls of any private tollway in Australia”⁴ per kilometer, because a freeway reservation had become too attractive to give up to cars. Five bucks a day might not be much to those who protested the destruction of the park, but it’s a pretty hefty slug ontop of already-expensive (and necessary) car travel for a lot of people.

Now, while this won’t please hard-core ‘visual conservatives,’ I wish we could at least consider elevating these routes. The ground underneath would be largely restorable, leaving animal habitats (for the most part) unchanged. Elevated routes are safer, as emergency exits can be constructed at pylons and there’s little risk of a cave-in in the event of a serious accident. We all remember the carnage that a truck accident in the Burnley tunnel caused,⁵ and the risk posed by explosions.⁶ They’re also slightly cheaper (especially if bought in bulk) with no risk of a leaky roof, and could be open to all traffic (placarded loads are currently restricted from tunnels). They’re not as quiet as a tunnel (for obvious reasons), but are still better than surface routes. I’d rather deal with road or rail noise way above than exhaust notes through my front window any day. We’re pretty good at building bridges – perhaps one day we can construct one over our attitudes to infrastructure.

P.S. Rowville, if you want a railway from a broke state government… elevate it.