...throw another snag on the footpath

For any international readers, or perhaps Queenslanders and Tasmanians, I just feel the need to mention that right at the moment On the topic of weather, southern Australia has gone a fair bit barmy of late.

It's 3:19pm, Saturday the seventh day of February 2009AD. According to the Bureau of Meteorology's excellent website, a product of the era's rapid advances in technology, the shade temperature at the airport down the road is currently 46.2 degrees Celcius (115.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Wind gusts above 60km/h are buffeting the world outside. I am dwelling in a dark converted brick garage, well shaded, and maintaining a temperature of around 28.9 degrees C. I consider myself very lucky.

The room is silent but the house around it creaks and thumps. I feel like I'm in a bomb shelter. Outside the sky is a pallid grey but the sun stills beats through at full attack, and the hot, northwesterly wind brings no relief. In fact the wind brings it's own type of burning sensation on the skin and lungs. The sky is greyest on the horizon, a warm grey, the grey of smoke, the grey of firestorms charging through the bushland around the city.

Last Tuesday it was 38 then 42 then 44 then 45 then 35. And we're lucky. Our longest run over 40 was three days. Adelaide copped nine or ten days in a row. My bougainvillea looks like a piece of dried seaweed. My cactus is burnt and my pussy cat looks buggered.

And our Premier, John Brumby, has a press conference yesterday to basically say tomorrow is gonna be a dog's breakfast and basically nobody should do anything. Don't even bother leaving the house! The Age online ran the rather curious headline "WORST DAY EVER". Talk about the cup being half empty. I suspect if I were involved in the Battle of the Somme I may be indifferent to that claim.

So why didn't Mr Premier urger such precautions onto the unsuspecting public last week, when we copped 5 days of bullshit temperatures in a row? Could it have anything to do with last weeks heatwave occuring on working days? The PT system was 50% stuffed and people were feeling a tad bothered out there last week, rushing to work in a blast furnace, sleep deprived only to feel like grumpshite and not have a functioning brain.

Where was the 'don't bother leaving the house' then Brumby. That what you'd call "A Convenient Heatwave", one that happens on the weekend, ya gobshite!

...australia...you're standing in it!

So fifty large Sperm whales die overnight on the west coast of Tasmania. Rather than sit around going "Ooh that's awful", "What a shame", "Ought not happen" and "'Tis a real tragedy indeed. Who can we blame?", why don't we chop them up and give the meat to the Japanese in exchange for them ceasing whaling in the Southern Ocean? There is more useful meat on those 50 whales than in the entire annual Japanese catch of small Minke whales.

And why not make a deal to give them the dozens of large and rare whales that get struck by ships or tangle and drown in the thousands of nets and craypots lines around the Australian coast every year, the "collateral damage" from our appetite for seafood and money. The whales we kill, the dead whales the Australian media rarely mentions, (unless the fisherman actually report it (why would they?) and there is some chance of survival and thus a happy ending). Why criticise ourselves? It's much more fun to criticise the bloody Japs (yeah that's right...we still remember the war)!


Anyhow, the whales we kill are not being deliberately targeted, so it's apparently all OK, kosher, hunky dory, not-our-fault-so-let's-not-think-about-it. Less than 3% of whale deaths from entanglement are actually reported, so the true Australian whale death-toll is not known, but it is likely to be in the hundreds per year. It's out of sight and therefore out of mind.

Wake up Australia! Let's clean up our own backyard before lobbing hand-grenades of self-righteousness at other cultures. The solution... we're standing in it! Lets give the Japanese a taste of our Aussie Sperm (whales) to stop them from playing with pointed sticks in our southern regions (I'm deeply sorry about that one but I simply couldn't resist).


And the mining boom is over. Well roll me in flour and bake me for forty minutes, who would have ever thought that would ever happen!!!

To all those people whingeing about the imminent job losses and the recently bustling towns that will now be largely abandoned, it's not called a 'boom' for nothing. Things that go 'boom' do not go 'booming' in perpetuity. This exact thing has been happening across Australia for 200 years. The country is littered with ghost towns, remnants of more prosperous times.

Why is it that the workers and their unions somehow think we should be somehow immune to the patterns of history and the fundamentals of our economic system that is tied up in a model of 'reliance' on unsustainable levels of growth through rampant capitalism. About time we seriously looked at the 'steady-state' economic model. If the human race is to have a future, this is where it will lie.


Woo, I think I need a cuppa and a lie down after all that. Next one will be a happy rant. Promise.