I am a bit of a wine buff (which is a kind way of describing someone who probably should drink a lot less fine red wine than I do). Back in 1999 when I lived in Canberra for most of the year, I started reading about wine appreciation in order to relieve the boredom of dwelling in Australia’s most boring city. I also started paying attention to wine brands and labels, which I had not done before.

By that, I mean that I started to drink a lot of Penfolds wine as my preference, and not Poet’s Corner (thankfully I don’t think they make that anymore).

I also started investing in a rather expensive wine collection. At one point, I had 2 bottles of the 1994 Penfolds Grange, one bottle of the 1995 Grange, one bottle of the 1985 Grange, and one bottle of the 1994 Henschke Hill Of Grace stashed away in an esky in the wardrobe in my spare room.

Anywho, wines are made to be drank, rather than stashed away forever like a pile of gold coins under a dragon, and over the intervening two decades I have gradually gotten rid of my premium wines the sensible way, ie down the hatch.

This past month, I have gotten rid of my last two bottles of the good stuff – the 1994 Grange and Hill Of Grace. I am glad that I did, and the friends I shared them with would definitely agree.

The wines were still very good. I think the Hill Of Grace, which I had yesterday over yum cha with some friends, seemed a little disappointing (the only other time I have had the Hill Of Grace was the 1977 vintage in August 1999 at the Tang Dynasty in Kingston, and it was a mighty fine drop), but still very tasty. The Grange, which I had last month with a wagyu steak, really did live up to its reputation, more so than I remember from the past.

The big problem of course is the sealant. In both cases, the cork turned to powder as we were opening the bottles. This is nothing that could not be solved with a decanter, which we had on standby, but it does serve to illustrate the perils of holding onto quality bottles for too long.

Having said all this, I have one more thing to say to you, dear reader, and I do this as a shareholder of Treasury Wine Estate (the owners of Penfolds). And that is, go out there and buy as many bottles of Grange and other fine Penfolds wines (eg St Henri, RWT, Bin 707, Bin 389 etc) as you can. Do not care about the price, or whether you can afford them. Just buy them. Max out your credit card if you have to. Skip mortgage or rent payments. I say this because I want you to push up the price of Penfolds wine and increase the share price of TWE and its profitability so as to enrich me.

Several weeks ago I wrote a post in which I expressed my concerns about recent changes to federal electoral laws to make it harder for minor parties to operate.

Since that time, two long established minor parties, who have enjoyed a small degree of electoral success over the years, have had their registrations challenged by the major parties, due to the similarities of their names. One is the Liberal Democrats, whose existence is being objected to by the Liberal Party. The other is the Democratic Labour Party, who is being objected to by the Australian Labor Party.

A High Court case looms:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/12/08/liberal-labor-minors-name-change/

It is disturbing when a major change to electoral laws occurs, with the support of both major parties, which radically alters the political ecosystem in which the minor parties have operated for many years. In the case of the DLP, who in the past 15 years have enjoyed a minor resurgence in Victoria (one Senator and two Legislative Councillors elected), they have operated under their existing name since the late 1950s, without any previous challenge to their existence.

It is a cosy stitch up, which shows how, whilst the major parties disagree on who should be in government, they agree on so much more when it comes to screwing over minor parties and alternatives.

Our political system is already very heavily loaded towards the two main political forces – the LNP coalition on one side and the ALP on the other. Compulsory voting makes campaigning a lot easier as it forces the apathetic out to make a choice on Election Day to avoid a fine. Taxpayer subsidies are given out to candidates and parties based on obtaining a certain threshold of votes.

These measures make it easier for established mainstream parties to operate and make it difficult for alternatives and protest movements to break into the system with any success.

I am not a big fan of proportional representation, except that I believe it is healthier for a cross bench to hold the balance of power in the upper house in order to prevent the government of the day from having its own unfettered way. But proportional representation does provide an opportunity for minor parties to make themselves somewhat more relevant, for as long as the electoral laws are not rewritten to impede their existence.

Why now has there been this change to the rules so that the major parties can put the screws to minor parties in an unprecedented way?

I think it has something to do with primary votes for the major parties collapsing. At the 2019 Federal Election, the primary vote for the Coalition was 41.44%, whilst for the ALP it was 33.34%. Compare that to 1980, where the primary votes were 46.40% and 45.15% respectively. Historically, for most of the second half of the 20th Century, both major parties could consistently count on a minimum primary vote of 45%.

The response from the major parties to the growing disenchantment in the electorate with their policies and personalities and general behaviour is not surprising. Instead of taking steps to try and re-engage with the voting public and recover their lost primary vote, the major parties are taking the lazy way out – trying to knobble the competition they fear from the minor parties.

None of this is healthy. Both of the major parties are locked in considerably vicious infighting at the moment. Branch stacking and purges have in recent years made front page news for both sides, revealing an inability to attract and retain genuine committed members.

Our democracy deserves much better than this.

For a few days there, after finishing reading Stephanie Kelton’s book on Modern Monetary Theory, The Deficit Myth, I was starting to doubt my sanity. She sounded really convincing.

This is the problem with not have studied economics formally, but just having read a few textbooks to teach myself economics. There are always going to be gaps in my knowledge such that I cannot easily pick holes in what intuitively seem like quite bizarre theories.

Economics all comes down to how you interpret the simple concept of Supply and Demand. That might be quite simple, but Economics is a social science, so there is a lot of room for error, especially when you factor in the need to try and predict the behaviour of billions of people.

Intuitively, I know that money printing is going to result in inflation, lots and lots of it, and that this could manifest itself in high bread prices, or in high house prices (most likely the latter rather than the former). But I am not going to be able to explain exactly why because I am not a trained economist.

And when clever academics like Professor Kelton or L. Randall Wray write their books and tell me that MMT is NOT money printing (it is all keystrokes on a computer) and that it is not going to cause rampant inflation, I end up scratching my head and wondering how to rebut these assertions.

Thankfully, the answer was sitting in another book on my coffee table (a giant pile of unread books I am slowing getting around to reading), financial guru Jim Rickard’s most recent book, Aftermath. Rickard is one of those people who writes about doom and gloom and how you should stock up on gold for when the Financial Zombie Apocalypse finally hits.

In his chapter ‘Free Money’, Rickard demolishes MMT. He asserts that there are two related factors which the MMT acolytes do not take into account when blithely arguing that the US or Australian governments can create as much money as they like (and they should). Those are confidence, and velocity. When confidence in a currency drops, the velocity of money increases, ie people are going to change their money into other goods (eg gold coins, shotgun shells, tinned food, toilet paper etc) and will be doing so at a faster and faster speed, forcing the price of those goods to go up as confidence in the currency goes down. Ergo inflation, and possibly hyper-inflation.

Thank you Mr Rickard for providing me a sensible rebuttal of Money Monetary Theory and restoring my trust in my own sanity. Now I will resume stock piling toilet paper and packs of dry pasta for when the tough times really hit.

I recently read a book about Modern Monetary Theory. I want to have an understanding as to what the current fashion is in financial policy, given that it does affect our wallets and our lives.

The author was at pains to emphasise that MMT is not money printing – it is creating money electronically by computer keystroke at a central bank (eg the Federal Reserve or the RBA).

Somehow, this does not reassure me.

What it did do was to leave me convinced that the post-Keynesian economic consensus since the mid 1970s is over. Those countries with a strong sovereign currency can issue, through their central banks, as much money as they like, until people no longer believe that the sovereign currency is all that strong anymore.

To a layperson like me, Economics appears to be part mathematics, part politics, and part psychology. It is a social science, and social sciences have never been particularly accurate at making predictions.

Last year I firmly believed that the share market recovery was founded on absurdities, and that there would be a long bear run. Today, I am not so sure.

What we have seen, despite the destruction of large parts of both the domestic and global economies through lockdowns and restrictions since the Covid started, is record share prices and housing prices. This makes me glad that FOMO made me pour my bank account back into my share portfolio over the past 13 months (mostly by last February).

My expectations now have changed. I believe that the financial policy makers, whether or not they actually are acolytes of MMT or other theories, will not allow a share market or housing market crash to occur on their watch. Policies will continue which will increase the money supply at least sufficiently to prevent such a crash from occurring. Such policies include the setting of low interest rates and putting more government bonds out into the market (which incidentally will result in more government spending).

Weeks like this one, where I have taken a 5% hit in my share portfolio, will be minor speed bumps. The access to the ability to borrow and spend more money will keep asset prices rising over the long term, rather than resulting in a crash.

Similarly, whilst I feel it absurd that my brick veneer dump in Avondale Heights is now valued at a million dollars (aka 11 or 12 times the average wage, as compared to the 5 or 6 times the average wage it was valued when I bought it 19 years ago), I do not see that house prices will be dropping to a more affordable level anytime soon.

For people making important life decisions like buying a family home, there is little room for error. If a median house is (optimistically) worth 9 or 10 times your annual salary, and you have a deposit saved of 20%, the risk to your financial security of a shift in interest rates could be severe. It is because of that risk that I get the feeling that interest rates are not going to be rising anytime soon.

I was having a few beers the other day with a friend who is on speaking terms with various people associated with the remnant of B.A. ‘Bob’ Santamaria’s ‘Movement’ (although I am not sure that the NCC and the DLP are as unified as paranoiacs in the Labor Party would believe). He said that there is a minor push to canonise Bob Santamaria underway.

I have considerable ambiguity about Bob Santamaria. On the one hand, he played what I consider an invaluable role in eliminating the influence of the Communist Party from public and industrial life in Australia even before the advent of the Cold War [Anti-Communism is very much a good thing in my view, and watching his TV commentary ‘Point Of View’ on Sunday mornings as a child has helped shape my views on the subject]. On the other, his Machiavellian ruthlessness in pursuing the Communists with their own methods and his high degree of social conservatism [which makes me seem very progressive in comparison] were not so laudable.

I will leave aside his economic views, which are best described as unrealistically romantic, based on a medieval Utopianism where everyone would live on farms under the guidance of Mother Church, and where there is no room for Capitalism, as it is worldly and unspiritual.

But on the whole, I do still have a strong degree of sympathy for Bob Santamaria. Regardless of that, Sainthood for him would be a bad move for the Catholic Church, on the grounds of Divisiveness, Saintliness (or lack thereof), and Absurdity.

Taking Divisiveness first. The 1955 split in the Labor Party, precipitated by the politically inept but jurisprudentially brilliant H.V. Evatt, then Opposition Leader, was not one where Evatt himself was solely to blame.

It occurred sometime after the communists had been effectively purged from the union movement, with their influence within the ALP mostly eradicated. However, the various groups either led or predominately influenced by Santamaria (the Industrial Groups, the ‘Movement’, and Catholic Action) had continued their activities.

Mark Aarons, in his recent book ‘The Show’, has argued, with quite some evidence, that Santamaria’s Movement was aiming, with the communists purged, to transform the Labor Party into a party with predominantly Christian (ie Roman Catholic) values. Evatt, in that context, may well have had some justification for his preemptive strike.

The consequences of that decision led to the creation of what we now know as the DLP, which served as the principal thorn in the side of the ALP both federally and in Victoria and Queensland, well into the 1970s.

Federally, thanks to The Spilt, the ALP did not win government again until 1972, and in the states, it caused the fall of the Queensland and Victorian governments, with the ALP not winning government again in Victoria til 1982 and in Queensland til 1989.

There is still, given the romanticism of the myths woven around the ALP, a great degree of ill-feeling towards their antagonists in that Split, with Santamaria enjoying the role of principal villain.

Given that, even though we are a lot more secular now than we were in the 1950s, a lot of Catholics traditionally have tended to support the ALP, any canonisation of Santamaria (except in the Simpsonesque manner with an actual cannon) would not bode well for the Church.

There is also a lack of Saintliness around Santamaria. As Mark Aarons indicated in his recent book, not only was there was a degree of ruthlessness in the way that Santamaria ran his machine, but a degree of dissimulation (not to say mendaciousness) in his words.

In Shia Islam there is a concept called ‘Taqiya’, which involves a precautionary denial of one’s religious beliefs and practices in order to avoid persecution. This concept does of course lend itself to abuse, such as being used to gain advantage in less dangerous circumstances. Moral relativism, which most of us practise, whether we like it or not, does lend itself to rationalising our conduct. You could argue that in getting his followers to adopt a lot of the methods of the Communists, such as ballot fraud in union elections and covert tactics, Santamaria was practising a distorted form of Taqiya.

And then of course there is the Absurdity around the idea of Santamaria becoming a saint. After all, he was a mad keen Carlton supporter and can you imagine Carlton Football Club producing a saint?

Then, what would he become Patron Saint of, aside from Carlton Football Club? Branch Stacking?

And whilst he went by ‘Bob’ publicly, the B.A. stood for Bartholomew Augustine. In an era defined by The Simpsons, can you really imagine there being a canonisation of a Saint Bart?

There were protests in Melbourne this week, principally motivated by opposition to the technocratic pandemic bill proposed by the Andrews government, a proposed law with significant overreach, no sunset clause, no effective oversight by the Parliament (indeed, it represents an abdication of the Parliament’s duties), and limited (if any) right of review to the courts.

From what little I have gathered about it, there was a bit of a carnival atmosphere about the protests (we do miss our Moomba). Clown World have placed some considerable and interesting material on their page (aside from alluding to my recent mention of Julien Benda’s writings in this blog):

https://www.clownworldau.com/story/nov-20-protests-2021/

More seriously, there has been quite a lot of faux outrage and hypocrisy by apologists for the Andrews Government, particularly around bandying accusations of fascism around at people who are protesting against technocratic government policies.

Let me start by saying that I consider the use of accusations of ‘fascism’ in political argument as signs of either ignorance or immaturity by those who wield such terms. I recently was in a conversation with a fairly articulate (and therefore presumably intelligent) union organiser who spoke of opposition to capitalism and fascism in the same sentence. That did not really help her credibility.

Most people who are protesting are exercising their right of freedom of expression against some quite objectionable laws and repressive measures by a technocratic government. There is nothing illegitimate about protesting such appalling laws.

Yet they are being accused of being loonies or fascists, and herein lies a significant degree of hypocrisy on the part of the active ‘left’.

Take for example the use of placards featuring pictures of Daniel Andrews with a Hitler moustache. This has been subject to very loud howls of indignation.

Whilst parallels between the technocrat Daniel Andrews and the genocidal Hitler are excessive, and of course, extremely childish (ad hominem attacks of this nature are always a poor substitute for a rational argument), the degree of outrage against these placards is extremely hypocritical, given the eagerness of leftists to use such imagery and accusations against those they disagree with.

Take for example Melbourne during the 1990s, when Jeff Kennett was premier. His most unpopular policies involved necessary tax hikes and drastic cuts in government spending – necessary because of significant mismanagement by his predecessors.

Not only did this result in protests against his newly elected government within six weeks of his election (suggesting a contempt by those who organised such protests for the democratic process), but in the use of images of Kennett as Hitler. There was a novelty store in either Lygon Street or Brunswick Street which proudly featured in the front window plastic busts of Kennett with a Hitler moustache. Where was the outrage against that? I presume the people indignant at the portrayal of Premier Andrews in that guise would not have been offended by Kennett’s similar portrayal.

I believe that the right to protest is one which people are entitled to regardless of what they believe. During the past 18 months of repression of the right to protest, some people expressed the view to me that because the people protesting against the lockdowns or other measures were not the sort of people who protested against Australia Day, or in BLM marches, or climate change rallies, that somehow, their right to protest was less than (or inferior to, perhaps) those who protested for progressive causes. This is not so. A healthy democracy requires that all people who feel strongly about a cause should be able to peacefully protest in public without repression by the police.

I have been avidly reading the novels of Alexander McCall Smith for about twenty years, since I first discovered The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and avidly devoured the first four novels (all that was in the series at that time).

McCall Smith is quite prolific, and has since then started two other major series, the Isabel Dalhousie novels, and the Scotland Street novels, as well as several others which he picks up or puts down as time goes on (I have not seen Cordoroy Mansions in a while, whilst Professor Inglefeld has made a comeback, and I really enjoy his new Detective Varg series).

Having come out of lockdown recently, I have blitzed through the most current McCall Smith novels available, the latest of the Ladies Detective books, the third Detective Varg, and the newest of the Scotland Street books.

One of the very appealing things about McCall Smith is that he does not really have dark or villainous people in his books. Detective Varg is busy heading the Department of Sensitive Crimes, solving very strange puzzles which usually involve transgressions rather than victims, and husband stealing Violet Sepotho in the Ladies Detective books is usually showing up on the sidelines trying to gain some sort of unearned advantage only to be eventually thwarted by Precious Ramotswe and her cohorts.

There is usually a very bright and optimistic perspective on human nature in his writings.

There is, I think, one exception. That is the character of Irene Pollock in the Scotland Street novels. She is the mother of the long suffering seven year old Bertie, and (thankfully now estranged) wife of Stuart Pollock.

Irene is a misandrist, with a bleak view of males in general (although with the obvious exception of her lover, the psychiatrist in Aberdeen whom she has now joined, having deserted her husband and sons in Edinburgh).

What makes her a villain is the emotional and psychological abuse to which she has put her son Bertie (Ulysses, the obvious love child of the psychiatrist lover) and husband Stuart during the course of the novels, given her rampant misandry. Stuart has been gaslighted constantly over the novels, whereas Bertie has been regarded not as a boy, but as a ‘project’, who is forced to attend psychoanalysis, yoga, and Italian classes, where all he really wants to do is join the scouts, own a pen knife, and play rugby. Instead, Bertie has his nascent masculinity suppressed by his misandrist (and now mostly absentee) mother.

It does get difficult to read the passages involving the odious Irene without getting angry, and hoping that something rather more bad happens to her than to any of the other characters who get their comeuppances in McCall Smith’s novels.

Whilst there are many people, like Irene (who left Stuart under the pretence of starting a PhD in Aberdeen where her lover had moved to) who are very educated but still not very intelligent, out there in the real world, one really hopes that she is just a straw woman, and that such dogmatic misandrists like her do not exist in real life.

Sadly, I am probably wrong. After all, I have a passing acquaintance with the utterances of Clementine Ford, who is quite real.

I can be quite the contrarian sometimes, particularly in relation to sports.

I have written a few times over the past couple of years about my decision to become a Cleveland Browns fan, specifically based on their lack of success, which reminds me of my beloved Footscray (aka Western Bulldogs), who, prior to the current golden era starting in 2016 under Luke Beveridge, had suffered from a particular lack of success.

Whilst they made the ‘play-offs’ last season (it takes a while for me to learn American jargon), this season they are sitting at 5-5, so I am not too optimistic about the Browns’ chances of doing better this year.

Obtaining fan gear to show my support for the Browns has been challenging as lack of local availability meant that I had to order a t-shirt online.

This has now changed. I discovered this past week that NFL merchandise can be bought from a shop at Highpoint, including caps, jerseys, and hoodies. And so I happily bought myself a Browns hoodie – brown with an orange helmet on it – on Thursday.

Until it gets too warm in the coming weeks, this will be my coat of choice.

Go Browns!

There was no bar on campus when I was an undergrad at Monash, which was probably a good thing, on sober reflection. Aside from not having the disposable income or the ability to hold copious quantities of beer or wine that I do now, I would occasionally wander north to the Nottinghill Hotel, affectionately known as The Nott to generations of Monash students.

Yesterday, visiting old haunts in a masochistic fit of nostalgia, I felt a bit the way F. Scott Fitzgerald did, when he wrote (perhaps with an ironic wink at his reader): ‘Once more the belt is tight and we summon up the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth.’

When, in my late teens and early twenties, I would visit the beer garden at the Nott, there used to be chickens roaming free range around the tables. I mentioned this to the barmaid as she poured me a pint of Little Creatures, but she had already heard this.

It was a very different time, almost worlds away really. 1987 is as far away in time from 2021 as 1953 is from 1987. Chickens in the beer garden was a charming quirk about the Nott, as was the publican, Kath, who had been there since the late 1930s as a newly wed not quite 20, and who remained the publican for about 70 years. [I did not know that then, as my visits to the Nott were an end of term thing, rather than an end of week thing, as they more than likely would be if I was to be transported back to that time now.]

Aside from the chickens and the record breaking publican being gone, the Nott is probably much the same as it was then, even if Nottinghill has changed much since the market gardens surrounding the pub when Kath first took up the license. The University Bar is currently referred to as the Steakhouse, and the food is probably better than when I did lunch there one rainy day in 1993. And the beer garden is still one of the best in Melbourne.

Which got me thinking, as I sometimes do, particularly as summer approaches, as to what are the best beer gardens in Melbourne.

Let me start by saying that I will disqualify those beer gardens which relate to bars which are not traditional pubs. I am a traditionalist, and I cannot keep up with all the inner city bars which sprout up and then just as quickly disappear. Nor am I going to include rooftop bars, like what Young & Jacksons and The Imperial now have.

So, here is my list:

1. The Nottinghill Hotel

How can I not rank the Nott at the top of the list, given all I have already written about it above? Aside from the character and history of the place, it has a beer garden which, even sans chooks, is spacious and shady and comfortable, running in a long oblong from the buildings of the pub down to the bottleshop out back.

2. The Standard Hotel

The Standard is located in a side street parallel to and immediately west of Brunswick Street Fitzroy. Surrounded by workers’ cottages, it occupies a spacious block immediately behind the pub, with many trees providing space. I have spent many happy afternoons there, mostly at work related Christmas lunches.

3. The Retreat

There are two pubs with the name The Retreat in Melbourne. One is in Abbotsford just south of Johnson Street and is famous for where the pub scenes in The Sullivans were filmed. But it has no beer garden. There is another Retreat in Sydney Road Brunswick, and this is the one with the beer garden, which is well worth visiting.

I had a very fun afternoon there last December with some colleagues, and the December before that with some other friends. What makes the Retreat particularly special in my mind is that its beer garden is dominated by an ancient (but still marginally alive) almond tree which would have to be the largest specimen of the genus prunus I have ever seen.

4. The Anglers Tavern

The Anglers Tavern is located on the banks of the Maribyrnong River, just opposite where a sign in the 1990s used to welcome motorists to the City of Sunshine, with ‘Maribyrnong Township’ in slightly smaller lettering.

I used to live on the other side of the ‘township’ (I much prefer that to suburb), about 10 minutes’ walk through the side streets from my flat. As a result, I have visited the Anglers many times over the past 30 years and it has many fond memories.

For example, Sunday afternoons in the mid 1990s when Wendy Stapleton would sing covers of various other peoples’ songs with the aid of a backing tape and one guitarist (sadly, she never would play Reputation or any of the other songs from when she headed The Rockets in the early 80s).

As the beer garden is located on the banks of the river, it has a lot going for it. However, I think that putting up semi-permanent roofing over most of the beer garden has diminished it. I much prefer a beer garden which is mostly open to nature, with more trees, as it used to be.

5. The Great Northern

The Great Northern is in Rathdowne Street in Carlton North, just before the street ends at the abandoned railway line. The pub itself seems to be a time capsule of early 1980s decor, and I find that charming. I have been there quite a number of times, most notably at an old friend’s 40th birthday drinks there, over a decade ago.

6. The Keilor Hotel

I really am not sure about including the Keilor Hotel on a list of Melbourne pubs. Technically, Keilor village is a part of Melbourne, and suburbia these days extends well past it to the north and west, but Keilor has always felt to me like a small country town tucked away around a few bends in the river, with only the hum of the freeway and the roar of planes approaching or departing from the airport nearby to remind us of Greater Melbourne.

The pub itself has the charm of a giant old country pub. I think it dates to about 1850, and was a stop over during the gold rush for chancers heading out to Bendigo to try their luck. The current publican has been there since 1974, and is related to a local family which owned it since the 1860s.

The beer garden area is out the back of the pub, surrounded by ancient gum trees, and offers a very comfortable afternoon of beer drinking. I was there on Cup Day, and it was strangely deserted.

The Keilor Hotel is one of those hidden gems of Melbourne, and well worth a visit, if you can spare the time for such a remote trek.

Honourable Mentions:

Given that I am on a staycation of 13 weeks duration, I will have sufficient time to visit more than a few pubs in coming weeks. From memory, there are a few which I do need to reevaluate.

The Kingston Hotel – Richmond. If I remember correctly ( and I have only been there twice), this has an awesome beer garden. I will have to investigate.

St Andrews’ Hotel (aka The Pumphouse). Does an atrium area out the back count as a beer garden? Not sure. As an aside, a former owner of this pub some decades ago was rumoured to harbour a pet monkey upstairs.

Bells Hotel. I have not been here in a very long time, so I am not sure that this pub, somewhere just off Clarendon Street in South Melbourne still exists, but I am pretty sure that it had a great beer garden. Maybe I need to try and find out again.

The Clyde. This place has been a haunt of Melbourne Uni students for a very long time, and is probably the only pub left in the area that still welcomes them (I think that Naughtons is not called that anymore, assuming that it is open at the moment). It has a beer garden, but not in the same league as the ones listed above. But any beer garden which is not just the concrete space with a plastic table and an ashtray en route to the toilet (eg the Courthouse Hotel in Footscray) deserves some commendation.

If anyone reads this post, please suggest some more beer gardens in the comments.

I was reminded this morning of the October 2020 incident at Qatar Airport where a number of Australian women were taken off a Qatar Airways plane and involuntarily subjected to invasive gynaecological searches when a newborn baby was found in the toilets at the airport terminal.

The sorry story, if you need reminding, is here:

https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/australian-women-threaten-to-sue-over-airport-incident-in-qatar/news-story/0e10ed3299ca2cb8286f4da8cc254c93

It appears both that neither the Australian government, aside from the initial noises of outrage at this incident, and Qatar Airways, who were responsible for the safety of those passengers at the time, are taking this matter particularly seriously.

No one has been punished (beyond a metaphorical slap on the wrist for one official) and no one has been compensated, with Qatar Airways apparently dismissive of the claims of those passengers as ‘lacking merit’.

I do feel that this is wrong, and that Australia, both through its government, and its broader community, need to take steps to make the displeasure felt at this violation of a number of Australian women by Qatari officials more widely known to the authorities in Qatar.

There are three measures that I think should be taken.

The first is for Qatar Airways to be banned from Australian airports until they take steps to adequately compensate the women involved and issue a sincere apology. In the olden days, this could be done by the various airport related unions (eg the time Frank Sinatra was pressured into apologising – he didn’t – to Australian female journalists in 1974 by having unions place bans on flights carrying him out of the country). But these days, unions are rather toothless, and it would be up to the Australian government to show some backbone and impose such a sanction.

The second relates to the 2022 Soccer World Cup, which is widely believed to have been awarded to Qatar in circumstances involving (to be more tactful than I am known for) somewhat questionable probity. Assuming the Socceroos qualify for the World Cup (and as I loathe soccer, I fervently hope they do not), it would be good for soccer’s governing body in Australia to make a stand on principle against both the bribery which resulted in Qatar getting the hosting rights, and the 2020 Qatar Airport incident, by announcing a boycott of the Qatar World Cup and keeping the team home. That would also show that Australian soccer is no longer a soft touch for sports washing.

The third measure is up to the board of the Sydney Swans. Qatar Airways is one of their major sponsors (as is not surprising when we examine the practise of sports washing). The Swans are also a team which has worked hard to become female friendly, having a large female supporter base, as befits a team which has fitted into a boutique middle class niche market in Sydney:

https://www.sydneyswans.com.au/news/875541/celebrating-the-women-of-the-sydney-swans

I think the Sydney Swans need to man up and make a statement against the misogynistic behaviour of their major sponsor, especially as they have a responsibility to their female supporters. The 2020 Qatar Airport Incident cannot be easily excused. Qatar Airways needs to offer meaningful compensation to its victims.