Quite a few years ago (time does fly), there was a locally written novel in our bookstores by a Melbourne English teacher Peter Minack, titled ‘CWG (Campaigning With Grant)’. It is written from the first person perspective of Brigadier General John Aaron Rawlins, aide to Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Army in the latter stages of the US Civil War.

It is remarkable that such a novel can be written by an Australian, rather than someone in the United States itself, who would be far more likely to be immersed in the knowledge of American history.

But Peter Minack is a rather remarkable person. Under his highly inappropriate stage name of ‘Ron Hitler-Barassi’, he was the lead vocalist for the avante-garde alternative Melbourne band TISM (short for ‘This Is Serious Mum’) which enjoyed great cult success in the 1980s and 1990s.

TISM were very satirical, and possibly too clever for their own good (I think they all were Melbourne Uni Arts and Law students), but clever they were. I remember listening to their EP Form And Meaning Reach Ultimate Communion (with TS Eliot on the cover) in mid 1987 in the John Medley Library at Monash University. Their song about TS Eliot was extremely witty.

I had reason to think about TISM recently. I have the habit, at work, of ironically exclaiming ‘GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!’ several times per day, in imitation of our sports commentators. It is the Olympics after all. A colleague said that this reminds him of TISM’s 1995 album Machiavelli and the Four Seasons, and it’s 1996 bonus disc GOLD! GOLD! GOLD for Australia! which includes a very dark take on our excessive enthusiasm for the Olympics and similar sporting contests.

The members of TISM would be in their late 50s or early 60s by now, and the sort of fiery satire which drove them in their undergrad years and into their 20s and 30s is probably extinguished, or down to the embers. It is unlikely that they will reunite and do more gigs or new music.

I cannot, as I head further into my 50s, feel a little sad about that, given that I first heard their music when I was 18, and I wonder how all those years have swept by so quickly.

People who know me well are aware that I am only ever half joking when I say that I wish the British Empire still existed and that I would much prefer for the Commonwealth Games to revert to its original name, The Empire Games.

Whilst I have very little interest in sport (except that the Footscray Football Club is sitting on top of the AFL Ladder this week and my brother and I soon may have to confront the First World Problem of trying to secure Grand Final tickets), it is fair to say that the main purpose of the otherwise pointless Commonwealth Games (after all, it is not there for us to celebrate our membership of the British Empire anymore) is to give our athletes world class practice for the Olympics.

The purpose of the Olympic Games, of course, is to win Gold Medals. Our national identity demands that we triumph at the Olympics.

So we pour lots of money into the Australian Institute of Sport in the hope that we can set aside our parochialism (very visible at this time of pandemic) and celebrate victory over other nations who do not have the riches to pour money into their national skateboarding and BMX teams.

At the Commonwealth Games, we always prevail on account of that excessive funding, even over the Old Dart of England, let alone over small West Indian islands with sporting budgets smaller than those of the Phys Ed departments of our local high schools.

But the main game is the Olympics, where nothing but Gold will count, not so-so Silver, nor shameful Bronze. We get whipped into a frenzy by our media, our political leaders, and the whole sophisticated sports administration industry to expect Gold.

I was reading today that we expect to be competitive for 17 Gold Medals at these Olympics.

This is why the Australian Institute of Sport currently receives $420 million dollars in federal taxpayer funding. There is no other real purpose than the existential one of winning Gold at the Olympics, and continuing to exorcise the Devils which plagued us in 1976, the year of abject failure when we did not win any Gold.

So let us do some back of the envelope calculations.

1. The Gold Medals are actually silver, but plated with 6 grams of gold.
2. In recent Olympics we have won only 8 Gold Medals each time.
3. Over a four year period, the Australian Institute of Sport receives a total of about $1.6 billion dollars in funding.

Ergo, each Olympic Gold Medal costs the Australian Taxpayer $200 million dollars.

That rounds out to just over $30 million per gram of gold in those medals. If you convert from metrics to imperial (please do), that comes out to approximately $1 billion per troy ounce.

That is something for us to cheer about as we watch our team compete at these Olympics.

After all, we have each invested quite a lot as a nation of taxpayers in getting those medals.

Only Gold ones of course. We don’t really care about silver or bronze.

I only wish that the real price of gold was close to the price for Olympic Gold. I do own shares in Evolution Mining after all.

I consider Australian Rules Football to be true football, and aside from my enjoyment of Ted Lasso on Apple TV+, I do not have any interest in soccer (aka Association Football).

Nor do I have any real interest in the Olympics. If I did, I would be posting on this blog this week headings like ‘Shameful Bronze’ each time the Australian Team does not live up to its taxpayer funded hype.

I do think that the Brisbane Olympics is good news, and there is one major reason for that.

The Brisbane Cricket Ground, commonly known as the Gabba, is to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch, with a 50,000 seat capacity as compared to the 40,000 seats it currently holds, as a result of the 2032 Olympics.

I have been to the Gabba once, and it is a fantastic place to watch football. Nor is it an old stadium. It was built in six stages between 1993 and 2005.

But it is small, and whilst the people of Brisbane are not as interested in sport as the people of Melbourne (or Perth or Adelaide), Brisbane is the third largest city in Australia, and therefore the people of Brisbane deserve to have a stadium with a much larger capacity than the Gabba currently holds.

What I say now is that 50,000 is not big enough. Perth Stadium holds 60,000. The Gabba needs to be rebuilt to a 65,000-70,000 capacity that can serve football (and cricket) crowds in Queensland well into the 2060s.

Heed my words now, Queenslanders, or you will regret it.

I’m old enough to remember when the Melbourne City Square opened in 1980. The hype of the opening quickly turned into derision and it rapidly turned into a moribund white elephant in the heart of the city.

The main symbol of this Quixotic attempt at creating a civic centre was the strange angular metal sculpture officially known as Vault, but which unofficially was widely known as The Yellow Peril. It’s still around, in its third location, a resting place somewhere off St Kilda Road to the south of the National Gallery of Victoria.

In late 1980, in the dead of night, contractors spirited The Yellow Peril away from the City Square. This had to be done at night and in secret because the Maoist inspired Builders’ Labourers Federation had placed bans protecting The Yellow Peril from being moved from its location. [FYI, the reason the BLF was considered Maoist is because it had adopted as its slogan ‘Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win’, which was the title of Chapter VII of Mao’s Red Book. You go figure.]

The rationale for such bans, from a union widely considered to be extremely corrupt, are opaque, except for the sake of abusing its power for the sake of abusing its power (to be fair, the ‘green bans’ that the BLF had placed on the demolition of older buildings around Melbourne and Sydney has preserved a lot of landmarks which otherwise would have been lost forever, but The Yellow Peril – which had occupied its spot for six months – was not in this category).

I read an archival article recently on The Age website about the removal of The Yellow Peril, and it did strike me how far the paradigm has shifted in 40 years about industrial action and abuse of power by union officials. We still have some corrupt union officials who abuse their positions, but for the most part they are quietly trying to line their pockets with union funds, like Kathy Jackson at the HSU, rather than seeking to flex industrial muscle to send businesses broke needlessly and to cripple the economy (as well as impoverishing their membership).

For that, we have Bob Hawke to thank. A union official par excellence, Hawke was able, as prime minister for most of the 1980s, to steer unions away from the aggressive and destructive activities they used to engage in previously (many snap strikes were called on ‘demarcation disputes’, where two or three competing unions would stop work in order to determine such highly intelligent and burning questions as to whose members were entitled to sweep the factory floor or some such).

Such problems were not restricted to Australia. In Canada in the 1970s, there were also corrupt union officials abusing their powers. The Montreal Olympics in 1976 had a cost overrun of over 700% (just on building projects directly related to the Olympics rather than just to infrastructure upgrades) thanks to one corrupt construction union official who was intent on disrupting the construction solely so he could extort bribes for his own benefit.

[Ultimately, he embarked on a new career as a loan shark, and ended up murdered by the mob. Not sure if he was fitted for concrete shoes, but that would have been apt.]

This is why sensible taxpayers often look askance at big ticket international sporting events like the Olympics. Montreal 1976 has served as a cautionary tale of corruption and mismanagement, which ended up taking the people of that city several decades to repay the cost of the Olympics. That is money that might have been better spent on other public projects or services, or left in the pockets of Montreal taxpayers.

Brisbane has now officially been awarded the 2032 Olympic Games. Two cheers for Brisbane. But it is unlikely that it will turn into a financial debacle like Montreal did in 1976, mostly because Australian unions no longer are prone to abuse their industrial powers in the way that they did in the 1970s.

And whether you like him or not, we have Bob Hawke to thank for that.

If you pardon the quotation from the classics, the title to this blog post comes from the Simpsons episode ‘Deep Space Homer’ from season 5 of that show. It is uttered by newsman Kent Brockman when live feed from the space shuttle shows an ant farm Homer has inadvertently broken. Kent interprets that as meaning that giant alien ants have captured the space shuttle and are on their way to conquer Earth. He of course is immediately looking at how to best preserve himself.

In that way, Kent Brockman was little different from E.H. Carr, the odious Harold Laski, and a number of other intellectuals of the 1940s, who, believing in the historical inevitability of communist domination, were quite ready to collaborate with Soviet Russia if it were to conquer Britain. On his deathbed in 1949 George Orwell was prepared to name suspected 135 fellow travellers, including E.H. Carr to ensure that they were not given positions of trust by the Foreign Office.

I do not believe in naming names or McCarthyist style paranoia or recrimination. The innocent often can get smeared along with the guilty, or the merely stupid.

But at this time, when we are faced with overt threats of violence from the totalitarian dictatorship which is Communist China, we do need to think very carefully about what communism actually stands for, and what it has done in the past.

The Simpsons, a softly satirical cartoon show we have watched for over 30 years, does give us some moral lessons. Aside from Kent Brockman and his welcome to the insect overlords, so reminiscent of collaborators and traitors, we could turn to the episode where the Simpsons and Marge’s sisters travel to Communist China.

That is an interesting episode, filled with the optimism about the future of Communist China of which we are now for the most part disabused. Homer, whilst acting the buffoon as usual (claiming his job is to be a Chinese acrobat, and getting painted as a Golden Buddha statue) does have some very informed and salient observations, like when he is bemused about how he can see emerging markets if they are all ‘commies’, and when he visits Mao’s embalmed corpse and says that he is ‘sleeping like an angel… an angel who killed 60 million people.’

An angel of death indeed.

Where do we all stand in relation to Communist China? Many decent intellectuals of the left, such as Professor Clive Hamilton, have tried for warn us for several years about the insidious attacks on our democracy. And yet we have had various of our politicians of either major party welcome donations from members of the Chinese Communist Party, and turn a blind eye to what those donations represent. Our iron magnates either stay silent or express themselves in relation to Communist China in words which go far beyond conciliatory.

What sickens me particularly is that the Liberal Party, which is meant to stand for individual liberty, and which at its foundation professed an anti-communism which is far less tolerant than my own, appear to have accepted with open arms members with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. If CCP members (probably current ones) or sympathisers are welcome in the Liberals, why not embrace active Marxists from within the Australian community?

Communism, as a form of tyranny is not dead, much as I hoped it was when I started my collection of kitsch busts of blood thirsty communist dictators several years ago (and no, keeping such iconography is not my personal insurance against Communist invasion ala the happenings of the Passover in Exodus 12.7). We should not forget it.

As T.S. Eliot put it:

Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World

And that lions no longer need keepers?

www.news.com.au/sport/olympics/fitzsimons-damning-two-words-for-cambage/news-story/a24db560b6909899eb7e2f1c581068c9

It only took someone as annoying as Liz Cambage to find common ground between myself and Peter Fitzsimmons.

Tempus Fugit, as Mork from Ork might say. Almost half a lifetime ago, I spent 7 months living in Canberra. Despite being bored and frozen and probably not doing my career any favours from that adventure, I do not regret it for three reasons. The first is making two close friends who are still amongst my closest friends. The second is that living in a strange city (and Canberra is pretty strange) outside of my comfort zone is the sort of experience everyone should have every now and then.

And the third reason was that I learned a lot about wine during that time, which I would not have done so quickly if I had been in my normal haunts. Partly this was from listening to and drinking with a number of colleagues who knew a fair bit about wine. Partly this was from browsing bottle shops and buying a lot of wine in escalating quality from Rosemount Diamond Label Shiraz Cabernet right up to Penfolds Grange (I do not dare open the 1994 vintage which is sitting in the bottom of the esky in the spare room – it is way too valuable to drink). And partly it was because I bought and read a lot of wine books to pass the time, when the only things worth watching on TV at night were Ally McBeal and the AFL.

I still have a few of those wine books on my shelf. The Oz Clarke 1997 Wine Advisor, which I bought on discount (it was outdated by then) and the 19th Edition of Australian Wine Vintages for example. Some of the others I bought then or a few years later I then replaced with updated versions, giving the older versions away to friends who were less methodical about wine. (For example, I only ever bother owning one edition of Halliday or the Penfolds Rewards of Patience.)

But I still have most of the editions of what was commonly called The Penguin Good Australian Wine Guide which I bought annually for many years, until the authorship changed and the new writer took to picking obscure and inaccessible wines which I had not heard of or ever seen in a bottle shop.

I have not seen this wine guide in a long time, and nor have I seen Jeremy Oliver’s wine guide in a while.

Which does get me wondering, as to how many wine guides are widely published in Australia now? 20 years ago, there would have been about 5 or so that I can name off the top of my head, which were published annually or close enough: Jeremy Oliver, Halliday, The Penguin, Langton’s, and Australian Wine Vintages. I don’t think I see any of these, aside from Halliday, in bookstores anymore.

Even a quick peak inside my cover of The Rewards of Patience indicates that it is a 2004, and if I had held onto all my 2004 Penfolds vintages, they would make mighty fine drinking right now.

I was once told by someone who worked in a bookshop that in the suburbs, the main books that sold were cook books (and by extension books about alcohol), vampire romances (eg Anne Rice and now Twilight and who knows what next), and mummy porn (ie 50 Shades of Grey etc). So I cannot see why there would not be a market for more Australian wine guides, particularly ones addressing current vintages.

Of course, I have some tips for whoever would write such a book:

1. Most of your readers are only going to set foot in a Liquorland, BWS, Bottlemart, Thirsty Camel, Cellarbrations, Duncans, or Dan Murphy (are you impressed that I can reel off so many names of common bottle shops so quickly?). Focus on ensuring that at least 50% of your wines are those which are readily available in those shops.
2. Sadly, most wines in common bottle shops are from vintages which are not yet toddlers, ie you are lucky to find vintages older than 2019. Cover these, as most wine which is bought is drank immediately.
3. A lot of people buy from online clubs like Vinomofo or The Wine Collective or Naked Wines these days. (I buy in bulk on discounts from those a lot more than I did.). It would be smart to see what those places are selling.
4. There is some room for including older vintages and more prestigious wines. Some of us who read about wine do have class (sometimes anyway!).
5. Leave out too much detail about wineries and their histories. This is what makes the Halliday almost as heavy as a phone book, and not comfy for me to read whilst laying about on the couch.

And my final suggestion to a potential author is to get cracking. Whilst we flicker in and out of covid caused lockdowns, we need our wine a whole lot more than ever before, and the 2017 edition of Halliday is both too out of date and too cumbersome to guide me.

What the hell does ATAGI stand for anyway? I don’t mean what it is short for (Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation). I mean what it represents and what values drive the experts who sit on this body and tell our political leaders and the rest of us whether or not a vaccine should be taken.

I sit here in my study on a Saturday night during yet another tiresome lockdown. As a Gen Xer, staying home on a cold and rainy Saturday night is pretty normal, although I would like to be able to have a civilised bottle of red with a meal at my local Thai or Vietnamese restaurant down the road, as is my custom.

So, with time on my hands and possibly gifted with a little more ability to express myself in the written form than later generations (ie those who have forgotten the proper uses of the apostrophe), I can sit here and write for a non-existent readership in the manner of Flavius Josephus about whatever is on my mind.

Hence I can tell you what I think about ATAGI and what it stands for.

Firstly, it represents the latest phase in the degeneration of Australian society and public life into technocracy, that is, the rule by experts.

All the people on ATAGI are at the top of their fields in the medical profession, which means that they are even smarter and better qualified than the physicians you normally encounter. This also means that they are probably even insufferable than the grumpy or tactless GP with the awful bedside manner whom you are used to having treat you.

GPs are not always the best communicators, and I doubt the good doctors of ATAGI are any better. But ATAGI has a role, as experts, to advise the government on whether vaccines are safe or not, and if so, to what degree.

Politicians are pretty driven and clever people for the most part, and very good at persuading sufficient members of their own parties and then the public to vote for them. But most of them went to law school, which meant whilst they are very clever indeed, that they did not have to buckle down the way that med students do to get their degrees. There was still time and opportunity for them to party on at the pub or wherever.

As society gets more and more complex, political leaders need to be advised by more and more highly qualified experts on the implementation of policies. Sometimes, it is very hard to understand what the science or mechanics is behind something, and getting the experts to tell you what to do is tempting.

Which is why the batch of technocrats at ATAGI are so appealing to the government. Governments like to be reelected, and they like to have someone to shift the blame to, although the mess around the world in many places is such that some countries are just giving up and appointing experts to tell their parliaments what to do. We are getting to that point here.

Secondly, the ATAGI is about cowardice. This cowardice is short hand for several unappealing qualities.

One is the blame shifting which the politicians are doing with the ATAGI and the vaccine roll out debacle (none of the current crop have the moral courage of a farm boy like Harry Truman, who had no professional education beyond knowing when to tell men to fire a cannon, but which sufficed for when greatness was thrust upon him, and who owned leadership through the quote on his desk ‘The buck stops here’).

Another is the risk aversion which has come from the way that the ATAGI has messaged the risks attached to Astra Zeneca, which has fed into the fears of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists (didn’t they all used to be nutty new age hippy types in the Dandenongs?), and caused even more sensible people to hesitate about getting vaccinated.

I suspect that this risk aversion stems from the fact that doctors all pay high premiums in malpractice insurance, such that they are not always going to know anymore how to take a calculated risk. Medical rocket scientists on the ATAGI are not going to be much different in their conditioning from the somewhat grumpy GP who tut-tuts you for drinking too much – both will be conditioned to be risk averse.

And a third and possibly more appalling part of the cowardice which the ATAGI represents is its prevarication. Whilst Year 12 maths is a prerequisite for entering med school, it does not appear that the understanding of probabilities has remained high in the memories of the members of the ATAGI.

This has probably contributed to their risk aversion. Simple maths is that we have many millions of doses of Astra Zeneca, and very few doses of the Pfizer, and that the infectiousness of strains like Delta or Lambda means that we should not wait many months to try and get everyone vaccinated. Simple maths also means that it is easy to calculate that COVID could at most kill about 520,000 people, whilst dosing everyone with Astra Zeneca would kill about 26 people.

The current wave of COIVD cases means that the ATAGI has yet again equivocally changed its recommendations about Astra Zeneca to suggesting that under 40s (or is it under 50s or under 60s?) ask their GP as to whether they should take the one in a million risk and get the Astra Zeneca dose.

Honourable mention to Dr Jeanette Young, Chief Health Officer for Queensland (and its next Governor), even though she is not on the ATAGI. Her recent public utterances about how she would not want any 18 year old to die from Astra Zeneca are going to do more to ensure that people do not get vaccinated and that some people get very very ill as a result, including young people.

And now to be flippant. Whilst ATAGI has proven to be pretty useless during this plague, the long defunct ATARI of the video game boom of the early 1980s would come in quite handy right now during this latest COVID plague lockdown. I do wish I had an ATARI 2600 games console right now. Shooting space aliens in some classic game like Space Invaders or Galaga or Galaxians or Defender would be very therapeutic.

Saw two kookaburras this morning on the way to the bus stop.

The vaccination rollout in Australia has appeared to me to be a debacle at all levels of government, where the technocrats ruling the states and the Commonwealth have all dropped the ball in various ways.

This was brought home to me particularly this morning when I looked more closely at the letter my elderly mother recently received from the Federal Health Department encouraging her to get vaccinated. Aside from the ineffectual health minister, it had two other signatures at the bottom, and struck me, on reading, as solely self-serving rather than actually giving constructive advice.

There were no links to web addresses where you could easily find local GPs or Chemists offering the COVID vaccine, nor a hotline which you could call.

Which strikes me as being yet another failing in the way that the vaccinations are being administered. After all, an elderly woman with or without limited English is going to have trouble standing in a queue at one of the public vaccination centres, and the ideal solution to find a local GP who (unlike her own) actually is offering the vaccine.

But this is not an isolated failing. Let’s take the Victorian Government’s vaccination hotline. When I called it 7 weeks ago to see whether I could book an appointment (this not being possible via the website), it offered me, after very many minutes of being on hold, the option of being called back. I did not get called back.

When a colleague rang it several weeks later to get his follow up vaccination shot of Pfizer, the script followed by the call centre agent falsely told him to wait a few more weeks in contradiction of the public advice on vaccination turnarounds for Pfizer. As it turned out, the state had run low on Pfizer supplies so it was discouraging people from trying to book appointments.

And then we have the mixed messaging about the risks of Astra Zeneca, especially through the equivocal and vacillating pronouncements by the Prime Minister and his various vaccine advisors (especially the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation). This has served to make people unnecessarily reluctant and hesitant, if not outright scared, about taking the Astra Zeneca vaccine.

Of course, whilst this is a rare marketing failure from ScoMo, it does not hold a candle to the messaging from the highly irresponsible Queensland Premier and her sidekick (and soon to be viceregal overseer) the Chief Health Officer, whose denunciations of the Astra Zeneca virus have verged on the downright tinfoil hat crazy.

Let’s face facts:

1. The sooner everyone is vaccinated, the sooner we are all a lot safer.

2. The risks from Astra Zeneca are very very very remote, particularly when put in the context of the risks from COVID. (So far 3 deaths from 4.5 million doses, compared to about 900 dead from COVID when we have no doses.)

3. Astra Zeneca may have some slightly higher risks (which are still remote) of serious side effects than Pfizer, but we will be waiting a while for enough supplies of Pfizer, whereas Astra Zeneca is easier to make and to store, which means we have it now.

The only intelligent voice in this entire matter is Dr Katie Allen, the Liberal MP for Higgins, who has recently spoken articulately about the comparative risks and shown rational judgement. If it were not that dumping dead weight ministers would be to show weakness and to possibly stir internal instability in the party room, the Prime Minister should dump missing-in-action health minister Greg Hunt and appoint Dr Allen in his place.

Which leads me to ‘Arm Yourself’, the new government vaccine campaign. Who came up with it? When I was first told about it this afternoon, I thought it was a joke by the Betoota Advocate or some similar satirical website.

I think ScoMo needs to channel his inner NSW Tourism Marketeer again, which gave us the ‘Australia: Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ ads with Lara Bingle in a bikini. Only this time, it could be ‘Vaccines” Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ (And I cannot take credit for this suggestion – it was one of my colleagues.)