Tag: australia

Categories
Australia Politics

I’m Not A Tech Head

So in the end this most predictable of federal elections played out just about the way everyone said it would.

I know I live in a bubble of latte-sipping inner city hipsters, and this is a big old country with lots of odd people in it, but at times the election seemed to be taking place in a parallel universe. There was a bit at the start where they just talked about boat people over and over, with both major parties trying to outdo each other in a race to the bottom to see who could have the most inhumane policies. I continue to find it odd that this is such a big topic for debate, when I can’t imagine it directly affects many people’s daily lives in this country (not to mention the fact that many more asylum seekers arrive by plane than boat every day…) Unless people actually think that boat people are responsible for Sydney traffic congestion? I mean that would be just ridiculous, wouldn’t it?

[Also, as a point of interest, I find it rather odd that no one ever really talks about how our new glorious leader arrived in Australia. Clue: it wasn’t by plane. He wasn’t seeking asylum, of course, but still you’d think someone might have pointed out the irony by now…]

At least the new government have a six one no point plan to deal with it though…

And there was a lot of talk about “cost of living” pressures, and the economy. It doesn’t seem to matter that Australia currently has one of the strongest economies in the world, that it avoided a recession when everything went pear shaped in the rest of developed world, kept its AAA credit rating and that the whole cost of living thing is only really a problem if you’re prepared to ignore all the, um, facts. But then what place do facts have in politics, when you can tell people what they want to hear instead?

So despite all the gaffes, the creepy daughter thing, the “sex appeal” comments, Rupert has got what he wanted.

For anyone who doesn’t know our new glorious leader, he’s a ten minute introduction that tells you just about everything you need to know, including the utterly bizarre footage of that time he just sort of nodded for 30 seconds in an interview like a buffering You Tube video (a sign of what to expect from the shiny new Liberal NBN I suppose…)

Categories
Australia Politics Uncategorized

Civic Duty

I just scraped in. Tomorrow I become an Australian citizen and — thanks to the special provisions that allow new citizens to provisionally enrol to vote — on Saturday I’ll get to exercise my civic duty in the 2013 Australian Federal Election.

I’m taking this seriously, even if I might just be in it for the sausages.

I’ve studied the advice from Dennis the Election Koala, I’ve read the only real guide to the election that anyone could ever need, and listened to the months and months of empty rhetoric, lies, half truths, and outright bullsh*t.

So tonight I fired up belowtheline.org.au/editor/melbourne and had my first crack at putting together my ballot paper.

Back home it’s just an X in a box and you’re done, but with preferential voting here in Australia you have to put them all in order. Yes. All of them.

The House of Representatives is reasonably straightforward, because there’s only 16 to choose from, but the Senate vote is for the whole of Victoria. That’s a whopping 97 candidates to put in order. (I mean you *could* vote “above the line” and let someone else choose for you, but where’s the fun in that?)

Some tough decisions to make, though. Given that I fundamentally disagree with the entire platforms of well over half of the senate ballot paper, how am I supposed to decide which ones are least worst? Family First, One Nation, Rise Up Australia… how do I decide which of these utterly objectionable groups goes last last, and which goes least last?

[Rise Up Australia did provide the most obviously ironic candidate, so maybe they should get points for that. This would be the ultra-nationalist, staunchly anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism party; their candidate for the House of Reps in Melbourne? Joyce Mei Lin Khoo]

Well anyway. I have made my choices, unless I change my mind again, I’ll be the one numbering 113 boxes on Saturday morning…

4th September 2013: Geez That's A Lot Of Boxes

Categories
Australia

Oi, Oi, Oi

So this morning I popped into the city to sit the Australian Citizenship Test. It turns out there are some, um, interesting sections of the test material.

To prepare for the test, they give you this book to read — Our Common Bond — and can ask you questions on anything featured in the “testable section”.

While the non testable section does at least acknowledge some of the more questionable aspects of Australia’s recent history (such as the White Australia Policy and the stolen generations), the testable part includes frankly astonishing statements like this:

Australians are proud of the fact that their nation did not emerge through revolution or bloodshed

Um. Really? Are you sure about that?

I think I sort of understand what they were going for, but I can’t help thinking this might come as news to the people who were already living here when the white man arrived. Federation might have happened without bloodshed, but I don’t think you can just quietly forget about 1788 – 1901…

My first question on the test itself was this:

Where did the earliest free settlers to Australia come from:
• Europe
• Great Britain and Ireland
• Torres Strait Islands

Hmm. There’s something missing from that list, isn’t there…

Once again, I know what they mean — and what they wanted me to answer — but I can’t help thinking that the first people to settle in Australia freely might be the ones who were already here when the country was renamed around them…

Other sections of the testable content are just amusing. There’s a whole bit on the apparently uniquely Australian concept of mateship, although I’m not sure which roads the authors have been driving on judging by their example:

Mateship

I don’t think I’ll be trying that in rush hour Melbourne…

Oh. And there’s this. The Union Jack? Really?

20130604-200541.jpg

Anyway. I passed. It took me all of 2 1/2 minutes, out of my allotted 45, to answer all my twenty questions correctly…

Think I prefer this test instead, mind. And I still don’t know the answer to the bring your own meat barbie question…

Categories
Melbourne Music

I’m Not Doing Requests

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, The Palais, St Kilda

This is a bit weird, innit? You all sitting down like that…

So says Mr Gallagher, three songs into his set, to his hitherto entirely seated audience at St Kilda’s The Palais theatre.

Do you have to sit down? I mean, have they told you that you have to sit down?

<pause>

Well stand up then…

<audience rises en masse…>

Thanks Noel. Someone had to say it. Thus began an entertaining hour and a half of old Oasis songs, stuff off his new album, and the occasional spot of banter. I was pretty happy with the mix of songs — including as it did, acoustic versions of Whatever and Supersonic, as well as a smattering of those great early B-Sides (Talk Tonight, Half The World Away, It’s Good To Be Free…), although it apparently wasn’t good enough for some of my fellow audience members, who started yelling out song titles at random in between tracks.

I’m not doing requests, says Noel. I didn’t spend 20 minutes last June working on this setlist for you lot to shout out random shit.

…Especially if you’re not wearing any merchandise, you cheap bastards…

One person who was wearing the merchandise was the kid sitting a couple of rows in front of me with his mum and dad, wearing his brand new Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds T-Shirt. He must have been about 14, and therefore wouldn’t even have been alive the first time I saw Oasis live (back in December 1994 at the Liverpool Royal Court…) Sheesh. That makes me feel old. Where did all that time go?

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, The Palais, St Kilda

Categories
Australia Media Music TV

Having The Most Successful Show On Australian TV Must Be Such A Pain

Funny. Only the other day I was reading an interview in the weekend paper with the host of Channel Ten’s long running weekend morning music video show, Video Hits, which mentioned how profitable it is for the network:

At Ten, Video Hits is seen almost as part of the furniture, having been on-air in various guises for 25 years.

“It’s one of the most profitable shows on the network”, she says.

[The Age Life And Style, July 2, 2011]

Two days later, up pops new Ten CEO Lachlan Murdoch to cancel it.

It seems an odd decision to me, as surely it must have been a relatively cheap way of filling a lot of airtime. I wonder where the nation’s viewers will have to turn now to get their fix of music videos and sport.

Oh. That.

Even odder, though, is this quote at the end of that article from The Australian:

Mr Murdoch, who flagged the cuts earlier this year, blamed rising costs in news, the multi-channel Eleven and Ten’s hit show MasterChef Australia.

Quite. Having the single most successful reality ratings juggernaut on your books (which must surely pull in significant sponsorship revenue if the incessant product placement is anything to go by) must be such a burden. I’m sure the other free-to-air networks–who have been relentlessly throwing their own imitations at the TV wall in an attempt to make one stick–must feel your pain.

Categories
Australia UK

Neither Here Nor There…

I was struck by a wave of nostalgia the other day, when my mid-afternoon-lull/boredom-alleviation strategy at work saw me tuning my iPhone to BBC 6 music, only to find Damon Albarn mid-way through a performance of his The Good, The Bad, And The Queen “concept album about modern life in London”, recorded at The Roundhouse in Camden in 2006.

Ah. 2006. When I used to live just down the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sitting at my desk on a dreary winter afternoon in rainy Melbourne wrestling with a cross-browser CSS issue, I was walking along the canal with Sal to Camden on a sunny summer day. Perhaps we were off for a pint of Fruli in the beer garden at the Edinboro Castle. Who Knows.

Of course I inevitably have a rose-tinted view of our past life–it’s easy to forget the freezing winter mornings and those commutes spent wedged into someone’s smelly armpits on a packed tube train that has just decided to hang around in a tunnel for a bit for no apparent reason–but regardless I miss the people and the places that we left behind.

Unbelievably it’s almost two years since we arrived in Australia (and now well over two years since we gave up our Marylebone flat and packed our London lives into 26 shipping boxes and a couple of rucksacks), and I began wondering how Australia has changed me (apart from the extra grey hairs, but I’m pretty sure they’d have sprouted regardless).

Clearly I’m still clinging to my old life in many ways–Private Eye turns up every two weeks to keep me informed about whatever hilarious japes those Coalition boys have been getting up to, and that VPN connection I signed up for gives me access to a certain online telly streaming service–but recently I’ve found that when I need a news fix I instinctively reach for www.theage.com.au before news.bbc.co.uk.

On the other hand, even after two years of living in this sports-mad, aussie rules obsessed city I’d still rather lose sleep to watch another depressing late night Everton result play out than sit through a whole AFL game. (And I won’t be losing sleep when the current season of that particular sport is over in a couple of weeks time, if only because it means that everyone will stop talking about it…)

Then again, with limited opportunities to expose myself to new British music, my Recently Added playlist is local bands all the way (a couple of notable exceptions aside).

So I find myself somewhat conflicted–no longer the person I was when we lived in London, but not quite a proper Australian yet. Still, there’s two years to go before I get to apply for this, so there’s plenty of time for that to change, whether I like it or not.