‘Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World

And that lions no longer need keepers?

TS Eliot – “Choruses from the Rock”

Around twenty years ago, I got on a crowded city bound train at Footscray Station. Standing close by me were a group of private school kids – I am not so familiar with all the uniforms as to know what school they were, but as they were co-ed, I assume they were all Violet Crumbles (ie Wesley College) – reading aloud notes on an English text they were studying. It was either Orwell or Huxley, as the one doing the reading struggled so badly to pronounce the word ‘totalitarian’ that I could not but correct him.

And I reflected on what a good time it was to be a teenager in a country like Australia. The recent atrocity of 9/11 was not enough to shake my optimism – after all when I was a teenager, in the 1980s, during the Cold War, we lived under the shadow of the possibility of nuclear war, of what I frequently call ‘ultimate violence’. It coloured our daily lives greatly with a preoccupation that at any moment we could get wiped out if a sudden nuclear war broke out.

Popular culture was laden with the references, and not just dreadful poems in the various high school magazines we published. There was ‘War Games’, the film where a teenage hacker almost triggers Armageddon. ‘The Day After’, which starred Steve Gutenberg around the time he was making a name for himself with the deplorable Police Academy franchise, was a deeply pessimistic film which I saw on my 15th birthday, and which apparently alarmed Ronald Reagan sufficiently as to subtly change his views on the possible use of nuclear weapons. Sting made a song ‘The Russians’ about the possibility of such a war.

So the end of the Cold War, where I remember going to a German Reunification party at a uni friend’s home, brought a great sigh of relief that has lasted me for over three decades.

It was around 1984 at age 15 that I read ‘On The Beach’, Nevil Shute’s late 1950s novel warning about the dangers of nuclear war.

Shute’s novel also served as my introduction to the poetry of TS Eliot, with its quote at the start of the book from The Hollow Men:

In this last of meeting places
    We grope together
    And avoid speech
    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

     This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

‘On The Beach’ is probably Nevil Shute’s greatest novel, much as it is hard to endure a story which ends with everyone eventually dead. It definitely is his most important, as he wrote to warn the world about the very likely outcome of nuclear war, particularly if Cobalt bombs were to be used.

Cobalt bombs have been mentioned in popular culture since then. One of the original Planet of the Apes films ends with the detonation of a giant Cobalt bomb which wipes out all life.

Sombrely, the Cobalt bomb is a doomsday weapon, something which will create a highly radioactive cobalt isotope with a 5 year half life, which can wipe out all human life across a large area, and then leave that area inhabitable for mere decades.

With the Russians talking about developing a nuclear powered stealth torpedo which can carry a 100 megaton cobalt bomb which will create radioactive tsunamis, I think that my sigh of relief from the end of the Cold War has finally ceased.

Which is probably why it is a prescient time for ‘On The Beach’ to be adapted as a stage play.

Regrettably, it is being performed by the Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney. Presumably, the adaptation sets the story in Sydney, whereas the novel, the 1959 movie, and the 2000 miniseries (the latter was awful), were all set in Melbourne.

Ava Gardner, who starred as Moira in the original movie, was quoted (probably inaccurately) as saying that Melbourne was the right place to make a movie about the end of the world.

The scenes of empty lifeless Melbourne streets at the end of the movie are particularly haunting.

And whilst I welcome the adaptation, as I do any stage or screen revival of the works of Nevil Shute, I do wish that it was set in Melbourne as its author intended.

Like many teen aged boys in the 1980s, I had a thing for Laura Branigan, she of the sequinned body suit and awesome wiggle who sang various hits, including the English language version cover of the Italian hit Gloria (with modified lyrics and addition of a post disco dance sound).

Recently, when idly browsing Wikipedia and wanting to learn more about of her untimely passing at an early age, I discovered that the cultural impact of her hit Gloria continues to resound.

In 2019, the NHL team the St Louis Blues was having a very bad season. Then several of their players visited a Philadelphia bar, where during the commercial breaks for an NFL broadcast, the bar would, at the constant demand of the patrons, play Gloria.

When they next played, the St Louis Blues played Gloria in their changing room after they won, and it became their victory anthem for the 2019 season.

They played Gloria often that season – including in a record 11 game winning streak, and when they won the Stanley Cup at the end of the season – their first ever ice hockey championship.

And they sold many St Louis Blues jerseys featuring ‘Brannigan 82’ on them.

As a lover of the underdog sporting team (ie lifelong Western Bulldogs supporter in the AFL and recent adopter of the Cleveland Browns in the NFL), as well as someone who always loved Laura Brannigan and her music in my youth, how could I not choose to now adopt the St Louis Blues as my NHL team?

[After all, ice hockey is very much a sport with an underdog theme to it which would appeal to me. We have the supposed ‘miracle on ice’ (ie the 1980 Winter Olympic gold medal victory of the USA over the USSR), the Mighty Ducks, and (my very favourite) Sean William Scott’s enforcer character in the Goon series of films.]

Go St Louis!

The Age has written, since the cancellation of the 2026 Regional Commonwealth Games, about the intended Aquatic Centre in Armstrong Creek, a recently built suburb south of Geelong in a marginally held Labor seat.

Apparently the plan was to build temporary stadia around two 50 metre racing pools, and one diving pool.

After the Games, the two 50 metre pools were to be removed, leaving the diving pool for the locals.

Can you consider the breath taking expense and waste of building two Olympic standard racing pools as temporary measures in some obscure regional town?

Obviously, the political motive, similar to what a corrupt US southern politician from TV shows like Sheriff Lobo or The Dukes of Hazzard would desire, would be obvious.

Which leaves me wondering. Did Chairman ‘Boss Hogg’ Dan actually intend to hold the 2026 Commonwealth Games, or did he offer it to marginal seats in regional areas as a major pork barrelling exercise?

It appears that he did not intend to actually hold those Games, unless he is so financially incompetent that he could not predict when he signed off on those Game 17 months ago (ie 9 months before an election) that he could not afford to hold such an extravagant spectacle.

In the latter case, it was an extremely financially incompetent decision – the first symptom of a nightmare we will be paying for many years into the future.

In the former case, it is even worse – it is a matter of a highly sophisticated electoral fraud undeserving of an anglophonic democracy.

For those who came in late, in early October 2020 a premature baby was found abandoned in a bathroom in Doha Airport in Qatar. The reaction of the airport authorities was to remove 13 Australian women from a Qatar Airways flight and subject 7 of them to invasive genital examinations.

This could well be considered systemic sexual assault, rather than merely serious violations of the persons of those women.

To this point in time, Qatar Airways has failed to compensate or apologise to those women, several of whom are litigating the airline for their involvement in this incident.

I note that the Qatari Government has made a public and unconvincing apology for the conduct of its minions, and insists that the matter is closed, but it has failed to address the issue of compensation, nor to formal apologise to those women.

Yet Qatar Airways, which is owned by the Qatar Government, has the temerity to be seeking to double the number of flights it offers to and from Australia.

The Transport Minister has recently claimed that the Doha Airport incident was not a motivating factor material to the decision to deny this request for further access to Australia to Qatar Airlines.

This is disappointing. Minister Catherine King had a golden opportunity to make a public stand on this issue, and to make it abundantly clear to the Qatari government and their vanity project airline that the abhorrent treatment of Australian citizens in the Doha Airport incident was unacceptable and unforgivable, and that real consequences follow from such conduct.

Instead, our elected representatives have chosen to hide behind pragmatism, when a stand on principle would have been extremely welcome to the vast majority of Australians.

Sadly, such pragmatism is not isolated to our politicians. The CEO of Flight Centre Australia, Graham Turner, spoke out last week about the decision to reject Qatar Airways’ proposal, calling it ridiculous. Obviously commercial considerations play a major role in such publicly stated opinions as his, but would it not have been commercially prudent to make public comments denouncing the conduct of the Qatari government and its airline? It would make customers feel more reassured that Flight Centre (my travel agency of choice) has their back and shares their values.

I will never fly on Qatar Airways. If the Australian government is not willing to ban them from Australia and and large travel agencies like Flight Centre are not willing to stop offering flights on that airline, then the best course of action is for individual consumers to boycott the airline.

If enough of us do so, that will remove Qatar Airways from Australia.

I was walking through Collingwood and Clifton Hill yesterday (as I did not grow up or ever live around there, I am not too sure where one stops and the other starts) and paused to admire the Bendigo Hotel in Johnston Street.

This is quite a distinctive and ornate pub, on the outside at least. I have not been inside for quite a few years, and it has the annoying habit of not opening until 4pm.

I quite like interesting and old school type pubs, and I intend to post more on them in future.

Many years ago, I read a book about the final collapse of the Cain-Kirner government. It was a collection of essays. by then-prominent journalists and academics. Essentially it was a laudatory panegyric by committed Keynesians who saw nothing wrong in the many fiscal and governance failures by Cain-Kirner and their ministers.

Instead, they placed the blame squarely on Paul Keating, the evil economic rationalist who, as Federal Treasurer, refused to bail out Victoria, and who used his leverage to block the sale of the State Savings Bank of Victoria to the Commonwealth Bank until the Victorian Labor Left were willing to support the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank in exchange.

It was not a great time to live in Victoria, the period from late 1989 through to late 1992. There was a recession and a number of major financial failures, at least two of whom (the Tricontinental merchant bank and VEDC) were due to serious shortcomings in governance by the state government.

The sale of the State Bank (and subsequent disappearance of its brand, subsumed into the Commonwealth Bank) is something which many of us felt deeply. I still miss it.

The sudden announcement today by the technocratic Andrews government that they were abandoning the 2026 Commonwealth Games due to cost overruns is only the tip of an iceberg which is starting to collide with SS Victoria.

The Andrews government, in its commitment to Keynesian policies, has been spending extravagantly for many years on its major infrastructure projects, collectively referred to as The Big Build. Lots of roads, railways and tunnels are either under construction or proposed.

Until very recent months, the Victorian Public Service has been considerably expanded in size and cost, and converted into an apparatus of the Premier’s office.

Small amounts of cash have been splashed out in handouts to the public – such as the annual payment to people who go online and do a half hearted comparison of energy prices to supposedly save on their bills. And there was the subsidy to people who chose to eat out in the city after the plague was aver.

At the same time as all that, he has found the funds to act as the white knight to the Karens at Netball Australia, buying the right to host their grand final for the next few years for a few million dollars. Similarly, the 2026 Commonwealth Games has been touted as a way of increasing tourism to regional centres and provided improved sporting infrastructure.

All of these things cost a lot of money, and there has been no abatement in the spending until this year. The figure of $180 billion dollars (ie $30,000 for every man, woman and child in Victoria) has been raised as the current debt.

This debt requires considerable austerity – both more responsible spending and the sudden recent introduction of higher property taxes which unfairly target those people who choose to own modest investment properties.

The only thing that surprises me about the cancellation of the Commonwealth Games is that they decided to actually make this hard decision, rather than continue on the high spending pathway and make less visible cuts elsewhere.

The implications of the decision to cancel the Commonwealth Games go a lot further than the possibility of tens of millions of dollars in compensation to the Commonwealth Games Federation.

The first implication is that of sovereign risk. When a government decides not to honour its word, it goes much further than the persons or organisations who have struck an agreement with that government – it means that other possible investors and stakeholders will think twice about doing business with that government or indeed operating in that jurisdiction. Because the Andrews government will not honour its word, it can not be trusted, and Victoria will be considered as a far less safe place to do business in than it was before.

The second implication is in the reputational damage to Victoria (and indeed Australia) in relation to prestigious events. Aside from the cancelled Commonwealth Games, Melbourne hosts the Australian F1 Grand Prix, and the Australian Tennis Open. And Chairman Dan’s Labor stablemate in Queensland is going to host the 2032 Olympic Games. The organisers of those events would be getting nervous indeed as a result.

Melbourne does not have the spectacular sights that Sydney has. It relies on being an events city – of being the sporting capital of Australia (and possibly the world) and on hosting other major non-sporting events to attract tourism (eg our highly woke Comedy Festival and the International Film Festival). This reputation has now been seriously shaken by this decision, and could take considerable time to recover.

The final implication that comes to mind is that the Andrews government has promised a lot to regional centres with the circus which is the Commonwealth Games. Supposedly, this is all much needed sporting infrastructure and tourism support for regional areas. Obviously the decision has been made the this is not so important after all.

But all of this, when you think about it, is about the money and about irresponsible behaviour. Spending the state into deep debt, year after year, is going to have consequences, just as it did in the late 1980s. Those consequences are now starting to manifest themselves, in the form of higher taxes and reduced services.

Expect even higher taxes and more reduced services for the foreseeable future. And reduced investment and business activity in Victoria.

Let’s face it, there is no political philosophy more obsessed with money and its possession (or lack thereof) than Communism (and its slightly watered down version – Socialism). Karl Marx did invent the term ‘Capitalism’ to describe the existing socio-economic status quo, and he was always obsessed with money – because he had little of it. Thankfully his factory owning, fox hunting, chum Engels was around to perpetually sling him some cash in between his own efforts to exploit the proletariat.

My possession of busts of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao (not to mention Comrade Ho) is my own ironic statement on the place where Marxist philosophy really belongs – the trashcan of history. Plus I do appreciate the kitsch value of such effigies.

A friend of mine is decluttering and minimising her material possessions at the moment, so she gifted me her two Ikea Billy bookcases. These were needed because two of my own inferior flat pack bookcases from another furniture store have started to gradually come apart.

And so this week I spent a happy Tuesday rearranging my library, and using a hammer and some nails (not a common experience for me) to restabilise my old bookcases for further use.

One of the newly acquired Billy cases has been used, if you are that interested (and you are if you are still reading this) to hold my collection of books on Ancient History (and my textbooks from my ill fated four year long attempt to learn Latin as a middle aged adult).

The other is to rehouse my collection of books on Shakespeare and his plays (it would come as no surprise to you that I have, over forty years, received three separate hardback copies of the Collected Works of Shakespeare).

The provenance of my newly acquired bookcases is of some amusement to me. My friend used to work, when she was doing her university degree in Community Development (or Communism, as her father goaded her), in a second hand bookshop in Sunshine Plaza over a decade ago called ‘Plato Books’.

It was owned by Dr Andrew Theophanous, a former Labor MP who was very much in the socialist left of the ALP. His doctorate, after all, was in communism rather than medicine. [Dr T’s political career ended rather ignominiously, but I will not dwell on his misfortunes.]. His post political (and post parole) career included opening a few second hand bookshops.

Whilst his oft stated intention was to bring literature and high culture to the Hoi Polloi of Sunshine, flogging a range of second hand books (including some computer programming and share investment texts which were out of date well before 1980) was more about, you guessed it, trying to make money. In that, he had some historical success, as he had apparently founded Academic and General Books many years earlier and sold that business for a tidy profit.

When Plato Books did not work out (I assume he named it after the first major totalitarian thinker prior to Marx), he closed it down, and gave the book cases to my friend.

And there you have it. My book cases used to belong to a Communist. As they are quite large and yet to be completely filled, perhaps it would be good Feng Shui for me to place my busts of Stalin and Mao in them for the time being.

I am a proud member of Generation X, far more virtuous and responsible than the Baby Boomers, and far less self-entitled than the Millennials (ie Gen Y).

I would say that the main flaw with my Generation is that we have a bit of a problem understanding Irony.

I will give you two examples.

One is Alannis Morrisette’s 1996 hit ‘Ironic’, which I quite enjoyed almost 30 years ago. She gives us many examples of things which she considers ‘Ironic’, but which actually are not quite so.

The other is Winona Ryder’s character in the great archetypical Gen X 1994 rom-com ‘Reality Bites’ (who could fail to remember her classic pick up line “I’m a non-practising virgin”.). There is a scene where she is discussing Irony with Ethan Hawke and he gives a dictionary perfect definition of it in clarification.

So my Generation might have a problem with understanding what Irony means some of the time.

Thankfully Crown Casino, opened in the flower of our adulthood (the 1990s when we were mostly in our twenties), is there to help remind us of what Irony is really all about.

The news today advised us that Crown Casino is arguing financial problems in relation to the payment schedule for a $450 million agreed penalty with AUSTRAC for what has been described as ‘very egregious conduct’.

Much as I have no problem with people choosing to gamble, I am skeptical about when governments legalise gambling. It is never done to maximise individual liberty (something which I support), but solely as a means to ensure that government gets a cut of the house take (something I do not really like) in taxes.

Aside from its large bank of poker machines to lure in and beguile the less imaginative gambler, Crown has as many tables as any of the casinos in Vegas for the more sophisticated gambler.

And aside from the social harm caused by gambling, where many people beg, borrow and steal to feed their habits, after first exhausting their own resources and those of their families, the high volume of cash turning over in casinos does raise the spectre of money laundering by crime syndicates. It is this which Crown has failed to properly address.

Which leaves its legal representatives arguing today that there would be ‘very significant financial hardship’ to Crown if they were to be forced to cough up the $450 million settlement immediately.

Isn’t it Ironic, don’t you think?

A colleague decided not to attend my giant retirement celebration last Friday because he was licking his wounds after not getting tickets to one of the Taylor Swift concerts which were on sale last week.

Oh well, my bar bill was well into the four figures as it was.

Much as I enjoy listening to Taylor Swift, and can sort of see what is going on with why so many people go crazy about concert tickets for her performances, I fear that she has some deep issues.

Despite being extremely successful and good looking, her music suggests that she has some unresolved angst issues, as well as a lot of self pity and self loathing.

I was recently introduced to her song The Man, which is probably her proposal as a feminist anthem. I enjoyed it, but I see some inherent flaws in her logic. Take the chorus for instance:

Let’s look at the reality – she writes all sorts of angsty songs about men she breaks up with, but she can pick and choose who she is with, and probably is the one doing the dumping. She is probably the biggest recording artist (male or female) in the world today, and has set several chart topping records which are unlikely to be equalled.

There are obviously a lot of women in a worse situation in the world compared to men, in the western world as well as less wealthy and advanced places, but our Taylor is not one of them. Her current net worth, according to the Ecosia search I did this morning, is $740 million (US that is, not Australian), as compared to Leo Di Caprio ($300 million). Yet she has the chutzpah to sing:

And they toast to me, oh

Let the players play

I’d be just like Leo

In Saint-Tropez

For all her self loathing and self pity, Taylor Swift has done very well. And probably, singing like this makes her an Everywoman for teenage girls and gay men to adore and identify with. But the reality is that she is The Man. She has all the power and white privilege that middle America can offer, if you happen to subscribe to such superficial beliefs (I don’t), regardless of her sex.

But I will still hum her music, even if I find her somewhat whiny.

The men (and it would have almost invariably have been men) who undertook the Haj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, prior to the modern era, would have been both rich and brave.

Rich to be able to afford to leave their affairs and families unattended for the duration of the journey, and to pay for a journey, by caravan at least, and possibly, depending on the distance, sail as well. It would have been a journey that could have taken years.

Brave, because a caravan across the desert involved running the risk of bandits and inclement weather. There was every chance of dying along the way, or at the destination.

Today, in the age of the jet liner, it is affordable to everyone of that faith who can pay the cost of the return airfare, although there is a novel risk of being crushed in a crowd of hundreds of thousands, and the ancient danger from the stifling heat, even where there is air conditioning part of the way.

I read T.S. Eliot’s poem The Journey of the Magi this past week for the first time in several years, and it’s words do convey some of what such a caravan across the desert might have been like:

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Travel, particularly Exploration, has always been the preserve of the rich. Staying on the T.S. Eliot theme, I recall the end of Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful Of Dust (a title based on a quote from Eliot’s magnus opus, The Waste Land). The protagonist, landed gentleman Tony Last, copes with the loss of his heir and marriage by going exploring in the Amazon, to end up trapped and the prisoner of a hermit, who forces him to read Charles Dickens to him constantly – aptly symbolising the cultural decay both Eliot and Waugh felt best depicted the inter-war years.

Learning of the loss last month of tourist submarine Titan, it intrigued me that several of the paying passengers are mega rich dare devils, one being a prominent member of the Explorer’s Club. He holds several records for piloting high performance aircraft for long distances, and has been on other deep sea excursions, and into space on one of those commercial tourist space flights which the rich now indulge in. I am not sure whether he has been to the South Pole or climbed Everest, but I assume that he either has, or would have liked to eventually.

But even though rich he was, and brave for taking such risks (I look apprehensively at a roller coaster and get nervous getting on an airliner), he was no real pioneer. He might hold some contemporary flight records but he was no Charles Lindbergh or Walter Doolittle or Chuck Yeager or Yuri Gagarin, men who pioneered flight.

Which did give me great cause for reflection this past couple of weeks since the Titan was crushed, with its occupants dying mercifully instantly but needlessly.

All those modern ‘explorers’ are not pushing the limits` of human exploration or adding to the body of human knowledge. They are extreme tourists, thrill seekers who find the ordinary avenues of travel to be mundane, and who take their lives into their own hands because they are rich enough and brave enough – or fool hardy enough – to do so.

In an age where Big Game Hunting is no longer acceptable, paying $US 250,000 for a ticket to visit the wreck of the Titanic, or to join an expedition to the South Pole, or to get on a spaceship owned by Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos, or to get sherpas to more or less carry you to the summit of Everest is the new form of exploration for the mega rich.

The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen commented cynically a century or so ago about ‘conspicuous consumption’. There is little more conspicuous than the sort of thrill seeking that mega rich dare devils are consuming today when they spend money which would take most of us several decades to save on a potentially one way ticket to the stars or the depths.

Are they bored with their lives? What would the philosopher Nietzsche think of extreme risk takers who do not need to take such risks, but do so recklessly for mere thrills, unlike the hapless tightrope walker at the opening of his work Thus Spake Zarathustra?

Thrill seeking is one thing, but it is another to disturb the peace of the dead. The Titanic is a mass grave for some 1500 people who met a horrible and untimely death. There is nothing romantic about that, nor about risking one’s life to go visiting such a dangerous and solemn place. To be honest, I feel that it is ghoulish. This is nothing like making a pilgrimage to Paris Cemetery to pay your respects to Jim Morrison or Oscar Wilde or the many other worthy souls buried there. It is more like the rubber necking motorist who cannot tear their eyes away from a car crash they happen to pass by.