Sermons and Confessions

I love the old codgers who phone talk back radio.  This morning there was a guy who thought that way to solve the health issues in Australia was to get rid of all the beaurocrats and replace them with health workers like doctors and nurses.
 
These thoughts are so shallow they almost don’t need a rebuttal, but they persist in our community so for what it’s worth…
 
There are more jobs than just health care in a hospital.  Staff have to be paid, patients records have to be kept, stock levels monitored and ordered, bills paid.  This is before the government reports that have to be submitted so that we, the public, can be comfortable that things are being run correctly. 
 
A reduction in clerical and administrative staff does not result in a free up of resources for more nurses.  Rather, it results in already overworked nurses having to cover admin jobs.  A friend of mine recently returned to nursing after a few years in an office job.  One of the first things he had to do was employ his clerical skills at the nursing station and fix up a spreadsheet.  This is surely a ridiculous use of a highly skilled professional person’s time.
 
Public service bashing is a common practice at the moment.  As employee of a government owned corporation I have been the recipient of it myself.  In fact the public service can’t be as bad as they are made out to be.  Where I live the trains run, the roads are fixed, the births are registered.  Most government employees that I know are moderately hard working people who are dedicated to their jobs.  They are generally paid at a lower rate than they could command in private enterprise, but this is offset by more flexible working conditions and hours. 
 
Let’s not forget, too that the government is the largest single employer.  So chances are when next your public service bashing at least one of the people you are talking to is a public servant.
 

My employer and my union are currently negotiating a new enterprise bargaining agreement.  There is, as always, a lot of B.S.  coming from both sides.  It particuarly annoys me when the union says inflammatory and insulting things about my employer.  They don’t seem to understand that having been with my employer now for well over 10 years I have a loyalty and a respect for the institution.  I’m not against them, I spend my working life being for them, trying to make their business as successful as possible.

It particularly annoys me at union meetings when they get up and address us as “Brothers and Sisters”.  I mean, come on, this is not a 1930’s communist uprising. 

So why do I stay a member?  I’m not naive enough to think that a large organisation cares particularly for me.  They’re not my family, they are my employer.  I don’t think that we would have anywhere near the offer that we do have were we required to bargain as individuals.  I pay my money to have a professional negotiator sit down with the professional negotiators employed by my boss.  It puts me on a level playing field and ensures my services are sold at a fair price.

Of course, if I wasn’t a member, the unions would still exist and the negotiator would still sit down, and my pay and conditions would still be improved by the same amount at the end of the process.  I retain my membership because I don’t think it’s fair to stand back and let other people fight for benefits that come to me.

Unions have lost touch with their members, but the answer is for employees to join unions, demand reasonable union behaviour and vote no to strikes and industrial action they don’t agree with.  That way we maintain a strong voice to stand up for fair pay and conditions and we reserve the right to industrial action in extreme cases where employers behaviour is genuinely unfair.

A friend of mine is a “stay at home dad”.  His wife is a solicitor and they made the choice that as she would be earning more money he would give up his very highly paid career for a few years to look after the kids.  It seems to have been a successful move for them. 

I was shocked when he told me that every year he has to prove to the Family Assistance Office that he has no income.  It seems that because he’s a man and his wife has earned a large amount of money he must by definition have earned more.  What hope for the community when the government agencies are sexist in their approach?

Each year for the past few years a group of us have gone to the Bunya Mountains for a short break.  There were four families this year.  All around the same age and most of the kids at similar ages too. 

These were the same people I used to go away with for drunken weekends at Coolum.  We always stayed at the Coolum pub and regularly swam nude in the pool, late at night.  (It was very dark, so nobody saw anything.)

It’s really very comforting to see that they are facing the same issues we are.  Balancing lifestyle and income.  Working at careers and spending time with kids.  Finding time to spend on their relationships.

We were up there for four days.  It usually takes me just about that long to get sick of people and want to retreat to my introverted normality.  I didn’t get that feeling this time.  I think I could have happily stayed another week.  Bring on next year.

My two little boys are into building shops at the moment.  They get some chairs and form them into shelves and then have elaborate construction games where all sorts of rules are set up about what can be bought or not bought etc.

The Sith Lord decided to give his brother a bit of a present recently.  He found a blank certificate and wrote it out.  Then put a big green star on the side and wrote the award.  Beautiful writing for a not yet eight year old.  It’s a pity that the shop doesn’t actually sell grates.

Former Howard Government Minister for Immigration, Phillip Ruddock has stated that it is only due to the Howard Government’s tough policies on immigration that the current government can afford to take a more lenient stand on illegal immigrants.

Listening to him I was reminded of the Doctor who says to the malpractice enquiry.  “The patient was complaining of a pain in his arm.  It was only because I took his arm off that another doctor could diagnose the heart attack and perform the triple by-pass!

The way Australia has treated Asylum seekers over the last few years will remain as a permanent scar on our history.  There is never an argument for inflicting mental torture.  By locking up already traumatised people many of them children, we did just that. 

I’m not looking forward to the next few weeks when our TV screens will be filled with the Olympic Games.  I’m not a sports fan.  I was never good at sport and I have very little interest in most sport.  Many of my fellow Australian males think this makes me a homosexual at worst or an eccentric at best.

I understand the benefits of sport.  Sport can be a good way to get exercise.  It can be a good way to learn teamwork.  It can be a great social experience and it can be fun. 

There are also downsides.  It can be a good way to get injured.  It can foster over competitiveness and encourage judgemental sectarianism, with communities split in their fanatical loyalty to one side over another.

It is, of course, an activity in which human beings engage and as such is as flawed as the humans who engage in it. 

My problem with sport in Australia, and it is at its worst during the lead up to and running of the Olympic Games, is that Sport is given a status far in excess of other valid human activities. 

We shall hear over the next few weeks how “We” have done in the medal tally.  We shall see ordinary sometimes very flawed humans lauded and criticised all over their success or otherwise in physical activity.  A success largely dictated by random genetics. 

“But” I hear you cry “These athletes slog their guts out to achieve their medals”.

They do and they should be praised for that and proud of themselves.  My point is that we do not give the same treatment to other people who slog their guts out working for charities, working for their families or even working to achieve greatness in the arts, business, politics or other fields.

I’m not proud that most Australian’s can’t name our VC winners but they can name the captains of the cricket team.  That they speak of Warnie as a hero, but don’t know who Weary Dunlop was.

After the 2000 Olympics in Sydney Gold Medal winners were awarded the order of Australia medal.  People work in charity their whole lives and don’t get an AO.  In my opinion this was a devaluing of the Order of Australia, but it does illustrate my point about where our society’s values lie.

I suspect that part of the obsession with the Medal Talley is that we can see our country’s name on a comparative level with the big guns of the USA and China.  This in itself annoys me.  We are not a world power with those countries, however much we want to be, and Olympic Medals don’t stack up beside economic or military power.

So I wonder if there are any good DVD’s in the shops to get me through the next few weeks!

My birthday present some time back was a ticket to go to Prince Caspian - Narnia II.  Went along today the last day of my little holiday.  It was great.  I really enjoyed it, but… First I have to confess to being a big fan of the book (and all the Narnia books). I discovered them in the school library around the age of 11 and was fascinated by the stories and the idea of escaping to a magical land where I could be a grown up.

Did this film really need to be 3 hours long?  There was a lot in it that wasn’t in the book and some stuff from the book that didn’t make the film.  Peter is made out in the film to be a really up himself teenager with anger managment issues. Quite different from the Peter in the book. Why, oh why did we have to have a love interest between Caspian and Susan?  It is said that CS Lewis didn’t like women much.  He certainly writes Susan out of the stories in a rather sad way through the Dawn Treader and Last Battle stories.  I don’t think he would have approved of this.  The whole scene of Caspian riding to Susan’s rescue in the woods is completely out of the nature of the story and made me exclaim out loud “Oh for God’s sake!”  (It was one of those moments of “whoops that came out a little too loud for a public cinema”, but you get the depth of my reaction). 

I loved the effects and the battle scenes.  The acting was good except that William Mosely as Peter is just as wooden as he is in the first one.  Still very happy I went and anyone who likes the genre and isn’t as stuck as me on the story will love it.

Tonight my son came to tell me that he was scared by Monsters.  He had been listening to “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” by CS Lewis.  It was one of my favourite books as a child, but I guess I would have been scared too if I had heard a dramatization of it at the age of eight. The scariest part so far is the part where they are on the island and an old sailor tells them that if they go too far they will fall off the end of the world.  I can tell my son something that might help him.  They don’t fall of the end of the world.  It all ends up alright in the end. Nice that I can still set his mind at rest.  Wish I could tell him how it works out with the real monsters, global warming, terrorists etc.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I have watched, enjoyed and owned pornography.  I suppose it started as a teenager when like most boys I was interested to find out what girls looked like and what people did.  The few items of porn that were available from other, richer boys were exciting and fascinating and they fostered my burgeoning sexual fantasies.   It’s hard to explain the fascination and excitement that I felt at that time, it’s not true that boys think about nothing else, but in my experience it is true that their thoughts can turn very quickly and intensely to sex with very little prompting.    As an adult this fascination has matured and changed but hasn’t really gone away.  Of course I am married and have two children, proof to the world that I have had sex at least twice.  I own two pornographic DVD’s and I look at pornography on the internet although I haven’t ever subscribed or bought porn on the internet.  I’m not under any misconception that the stories reflect anyone’s real life and they certainly don’t reflect the sexual thinking or acts of any woman that I have been close enough to ask about the subject.My justification was that the movies and pictures were of adults who were being paid lots of money to perform under their own free will.  It enhanced my fantasies and sometimes made the fun activity of masturbation more interesting and exciting.  In short a fairly harmless practice. That view has been challenged in the last couple of weeks.  I recently heard John Safran and Father Bob (Sunday Night Safran, Triple J) talking to two women who have a ministry in Los Angeles that works with people in the porn industry.  According to these two women, ex porn stars themselves, most porn actors are victims of child abuse.  Their self esteem has been damaged and they try to make sex a meaningless act that they can do for money.  Often they have drifted from stripping or prostitution into the porn industry.  Often they are supporting drug habits.  They are vulnerable people who are used by organised crime to make these movies.  Many are suffering from STDs because most pornographers ignore laws that forbid the exchange of bodily fluid in these films.  Many of the actors are stuck in the industry, too afraid to leave and fearful of being recognized by potential normal employers.  Some are even suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I can’t say that I will never look at porn again, but I certainly can’t think of it as harmless any more.