On Photography

A pumice stone
or
early morning lover's kiss.
Whiskers will themselves into a field of
being. Diurnal cleanliness. Remember
Ever-present, latent.
Weakly hidden -
pantomime surprise which misplaced the pantomime.

But why write in ideas on images?

Sleeptalk is not intentional
Forgiveness, then, should be essential
For the sounds on predawn breath
Might else lead to my loneliness.

The photograph is a thieving youth.
Our dignity so puffed up it blistered;
Now bursts its sickened puss.
The photograph is the youth's fence.

May the eyes of day never dawn
Vespers take me
Mephistopheles
The sun may enclose me with her flares
If night to day I do compare.

BHP are digging up our mineral wealth.

BHP are digging up our mineral wealth and Aussies deserve their fair share of it. 

Australia's mineral wealth belongs to all Australians.  Yet it is the big miners who take the money and put some of it into tax havens.  Good for investors, sure, but is it good for all Australians?  Not by a long shot.  Unless we ensure that there is a direct link between what is being dug up from the ground and the profits it makes, we are simply pandering to the greed of miners at the expense of the Australian people.  BHP don't like paying the tax and you can understand it.  But do not be fooled into thinking it will cost jobs and kill the company.  In the first half of 2011, BHP has reported a net profit growth of 71.5%.

It is argued that taxing the mining companies will push up the cost of living for anyone who pays electricity bills.  This is true, but it is only true because for too long successive Australian governments have skewed our tax system and infrastructure towards big mining.  It has now become apparent just how costly this is for ordinary Australians. 

Because of the increasing costs of building community infrastructure in the deserts of Western Australia and Queensland, those of use who live in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide (that's most of us) lose out federal funding.  Yet every time a new mine is opened in a town with a settled population of around 200 and a mobile population of thousands, someone has to fund a new ring road for semi-trailers. New schools are built and sometimes a railway.  The government have to fund GP clinics because it is otherwise impossible to coax doctors out into the middle of nowhere.  The local council must build parks, childcare services and other amenities.  All this infrastructure is usually in use for less than twenty years. In the case of Nickel mines in Beaconsfield and Ravensthorpe the infrastructure was used for less than five years because the Nickel price fell through the floor.  But it doesn't cost any less to build.  For these reasons, the government has been forced to take hundreds of millions in GST revenue from New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia to put into Queensland and Western Australia.  Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu was right to complain that Victorians should feel let down.  After all, the logic for building the ring road and upgrading the Princes to Geelong was that it would build economic ties between these two ports, help to deal with population pressure in Melbourne while stimulating the local Geelong economy.  Building ring roads and railways to mines have none of these long term effects. 

Another way it affects most Australians is by spoiling employment growth in any sector that is not related to mining and transport.  A mechanic just out of his apprenticeship can earn $58 an hour in the Pilbara, whereas according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the national average is between $12 and $18.  A mechanic in Sydney will pay his best few mechanics as much as he can afford to keep them on.  This cuts down the small business' margins and makes it almost impossible for them to employ more mechanics.  As their newly qualified apprentices struggle to find work, they are lost to the mining communities in WA.  What is Tony Abbott's response to this?  Move to Western Australia.  But we can't all move our lives to dig from the ground.  Moreover, BHP is Australia's largest company and as such will do fine without so many taxation concessions.  

Given the pressure that mining puts on business growth in our major cities, governments ponder the challenges of a patchwork economy.  How does Australia transition from an economy dependant on transport and oil (already fat on highways and lean on rail) to move raw mining goods sold overseas to an economy that plays to our strong education base? Australia is well placed to build an economy based on knowledge services such as accounting, engineering, consultancy, education, entertainment and the arts and medical expertise.  It has the requisite knowledge, although the high Australian dollar makes this a difficult business plan to execute at present.  Likewise, Australia is well positioned to manufacture high end, high return products like electronics, medical equipment and pharmaceutical goods.  There is no reason why Australia should not be able produce a company like Siemens to help manufacture clean energy.  Instead, infrastructure, tax structures and trade conditions that would help develop these industries have been sacrificed to the needs of big miners. A tax wont go all the way to addressing this, but it will help. 

I'm not saying that mining is a bad thing that hurts us all.  I'm simply saying that given the pressure it puts on our tax dollars, it needs to contribute more to the federal government's budget bottom line – no matter which major party finds itself in power.  The balance is currently out of whack but when Rudd tried to fix it, it cost him his job.  Australians need to be more awake to the logic of the mining tax instead of allowing themselves to be scared of cost of living increases which are in large part driven by the rising cost of oil.  It's true that the tax will contribute to them, but in the long term it will help drive them down and make the whole of Australia more properous.  After all, with the rise of the Indian, Chinese, Indonesian and Brazilian economies also dependant on oil for transport (and, in China's case, the communist government's relentless economic stimulus), petrol prices will only continue to rise.

Abbott has made ground by running the line that Labour spending is out of control and the mining tax is a quick political fix.  For the good of the Liberal party he is right to do so, but from the perspective of the good of all Australians he's got it wrong.  He has caved into the massive political pressure exerted from the mining lobby and the IPA – John Roskam's far right 'think tank'  funded by mining and oil concerns.  We should not allow investment into Australia's future infrastructure to be dominated by a mining fiefdom. 

The reason for this is not simply economic, it is social and environmental.  I will leave a discussion of the consequences of taxation on the Australian environment to someone more qualified.  But I will quickly make an argument for Australia's mineral wealth to be more evenly distributed through an appeal to history. 

This point is ideologically based.  But it is the ideology that after all forms the logic of economics in a capital trade based economic system, and is therefore entirely reasonable in the context of economic argumentation: the mineral wealth of the Australian nation belongs to all Australians, not just BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata.

In the time leading up to the 1850s, Australia's colonial administration was dominated by landed aristocracies.  Those squatters who managed to survive had bought up the land already cleared by those who had failed around them and moved back into Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide  (Paul Carter's analysis of the spatial dimensions of this process is brilliant if occasionally cumbersome, if you're interested in a good read – Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay).   The original  opportunities afforded to freed convicts to build wealth and social status had disappeared in the space of only sixty years. Now convicts were used by successful squatters for cheap labour and were otherwise considered such a nuisance that colonial governments were asking England to stop sending them. 

It is clear that some convicts at least had wanted to come to Australia.  Some Irishwomen who were convicted of petty crimes howled openly in the docks when they were not sentenced to deportation.  But this dream was over, the petty criminals were treated with a mixture of contempt and derision by squatters and the colonial administration which they influenced alike.  Money for building colonial infrastructure such as roads and schools was diverted to cattle and sheep stations.  This arrangement maintained the money, education, privilege and power of the wealthy with scant regard for anyone else.  In short, it created a class system.  

Then, on 15 May 1851, the Sydney Morning Herald announced that gold had been found.  Convicts and failed squatters rushed to the New South Welsh goldfields.  In August, people had moved to Ballarat.  According to Manning Clark, Melbourne and Geelong was empty of men until December of the same year, when some had failed to find their fortune or the fortitude to continue looking for it.  The wealth which this gold afforded to individual diggers was the turn of luck which helped to break the squatter's economic and ideological strangle-hold on power. 

During the gold rush there was debate about the future make up of colonial constitutions for legislative assemblies.  The large landowners wanted “a conservative one – a British... not a Yankee constitution” which would guarantee their position and interests in a British House of Lords arrangement of inherited powers.  New South Welsh liberals and Republicans – vocal and large in number – wanted a truly democratic system which safeguarded the weight of each man's vote equally.  They didn't get it.

When they were denied it in Victoria, the government tried to move in on miner's profits to safeguard the landed interest against the economic clout of gold money.  Diggers were treated as one and the same thing as convicts (especially those without proper licenses). Those who struck it rich were derided and scorned for shopping on Collins Street when they had no prior land or education. Government taxes on individual diggers sought to buoy up the power of the established rich.  It famously ended in the Eureka stockade – an event which ran deep into the hearts and minds of that generation and the next, and helped to ensure that our federal system of government instilled the right of each man to have an equal vote.  Women, as history tells us, would have to wait. 

Now, it could be argued that the Eureka Stockade is a poor example to bring up in favour of taxing miners.  But the fact is that the situation is currently similar, only in reverse.  Where once the land owners were an Aristocracy in all but name (and they wanted to change even that), now it is the interests of major mining corporations that subverts the legitimate power and potential for social mobility for the majority of Australians.  Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer are the new Wentworth.   And where the gold mining tax was in the interests of a few land owners because it dampened the potential for economic growth for everyone else, the gold mines took Australia's mineral wealth and shared it to any individual with the industry to get it. Similarly, the Mining Super Profits Tax takes the mineral wealth of Australia and shares it with us all.

MySchool and the NAPLAN - literacy and numeracy

Schools, and the schooling system, are often criticised for stifling creativity and failing to give space for kids to grow and develop their own interests. At the same time there is a sense that good, conservative skills like sound literacy and numeracy are no longer taught – that today students are taught maths and English lite.

These two things might seem at odds to begin with. On the one hand, parents complain that kids are forced to conform to a set criteria which doesn't recognise their child's true potential. On the other, the complaint is that kids cannot perform normal functions like reading, writing, and maths probably because education is too soft and directionless. Some parents are worried that their kids are being forced into a box while others worry that their kids could not get a job because their education is too far outside of it.

In reality, there doesn't need to be a conflict. Proper basic literacy  helps people to develop a sense of themselves and their relationship with the world, as long as the emphasis of this literacy is on communications. This is understood by some policy makers.  One of the better things about the latest incarnation of the Victorian curriculum was the emphasis on integration. This means that students would learn to approach things from a variety of viewpoints. Kids might look at relevant things that they can engage with, like 'body image' for secondary students, from any number of angles. They can look at healthy eating and living in Science and Home Economics and crunch out the figures and statistics that doctors use to determine genuine ailments in mathematics. While they do this, they can write personal stories of what this information means to them in English, or else think beyond themselves and prepare a persuasive speech or satire to get their message out. Art and drama help to give new means of expression with which to communicate the difficult, ideologically layered response to the possible meanings of the human body. Taught in an exceptional way, this curriculum would produce students who can not only read and write and add up, but who could interact and relate to the community and the world around them confidently and through a variety of means.

I have a story from teaching in the territory that gives an example of this. Working in a remote Indigenous community school I saw first hand the material and psychic poverty that poor numeracy and literacy contributes to. However, in an environment where most kids aren't necessarily expected to turn up to school every day from home, teachers spend a large amount of time and energy on trying to engage students in what they were learning. If they enjoyed being there the kids would turn up because they wanted to.

However being engaging could be difficult, because the basic numeracy and literacy the kids needed to learn is 'traditionally' taught through repetition.  This most often means sitting at a desk on plastic chairs with a sheet of paper and a pen. What kid would turn up for that if there's a choice of riding their bikes around town and getting into mischief?

I asked some experienced teachers what I should do.  On their advice I decided to take my grade 5s and 6s out on a field trip. It so happened that my being there coincided with the centenary of the community's founding as a mission. So I asked the kids 'what places are important to this community's history, and to it now.' I threw google maps up on the wall and we tagged the places they identified. I told them that because I was a visitor there I wanted them to take me to these places so I could learn about them. We wrote a letter asking permission to the principal on the board as a class. This was the basic literacy part – we had to get it right. But the class had an incentive to do it, and the kids joined in. It was a great way to learn about basic grammatical structure in a way that made it obvious that it was helping them to communicate, rather than to pass a test.

The principal wrote back allowing us to go (I had checked with him first). We got in, drove around and took photos. The kids told me stories about the places that they had learnt from their community, and we made pictures. We uploaded the written stories and the drawings and paintings onto the Google site.

Some interesting things happened. First of all, the kids opened up. I was used to getting one or two word answers to my questions from these students who spoke English as a Second Language. But now that they were interested in what they were doing, and in teaching me – since they were speaking to communicate, not just because that's what you do at school – they spoke to me at length. Some kids spent all their lunch break with me telling me things and looked disappointed when I told them I had to go to class.

Secondly, I learnt a lot about what kind of knowledge these kids had. They told me how to prepare a bush fowl and how many people it would feed, how to use dried grass pods as instruments and about the traditional rituals they used these instruments at. They told me the dream-time stories about the places we were traveling through. They were clearly very knowledgeable, just not in a way that shows up in standardised testing. But now, as their teacher, I could see the potential in them. At the same time, they had built their literacy skills.  

This is why it's a bit disappointing to find out that the NAPLAN test is being used as an authoritative source of data for making decisions about school funding and the proposed national curriculum. I don't have an a priori problem with the test itself, but as things stand it is set up to do more harm than good. The first reason is that teachers are already stretched. They have a lot of curriculum to cover in a short space of time, yet every week we hear new experts upset that this or that important thing isn't covered in school (be it nutrition, fire safety or mortgage management). When such important things are already being left out, how does it help to take three full mornings of class time from a teacher? It is disruptive to their planning and the continuity of their lessons, unless teachers plan around it.

And arguably worse, this is exactly what teachers do. Knowing that their school's funding is linked to their test results, teachers would perversely being doing their students a disservice if they failed to teach to the test. Rather than three mornings off, students spend weeks just learning how to pass this pen and paper test. The results of these trends are then artificially inflated year by year as teachers and students are better prepared for what to expect from them, and how to teach to them. It gives the illusion of true improvement in literacy and numeracy which can then be spun as a good news story for politicians.

And this is worse still for students at many private schools. Schools whose enrollment numbers depend on the perception that they will give their kids a competitive advantage in life and getting into university will have to do anything to be ranked highest in myschool.com. This means taking away from their well resourced and often very innovative methods of teaching to have kids sit down for weeks on end with a pen and a blank sheet of paper.

But is this testing literacy and numeracy at all? Only if the assumption is that no matter what, it's the score at the end of the day that counts.  But if we believe this, we are fooling ourselves and our children into seeing statistics but not asking 'what does this statistic mean?'  This is not good numeracy. Likewise, we may bring up a generation of children whose spelling and grammar is impeccable, but who cannot use it to communicate or interact with the world. These two things need not be mutually exclusive, and no test that does not test for both could be said to be truly testing literacy and numeracy.

The all-American hero always gets his man

The reaction to the news of Osama bin Laden's death at the hands of US navy seals has been overwhelming positive from world leaders. But there is a different feeling amongst many run of the mill Australians. Don't get me wrong – I think there would be very few Australians who particularly mind that he's dead. But the way Americans reacted to the news has made a lot of us feel a bit uneasy.

As Barack Obama delivered the news of bin Laden's killing, Americans were already revelling and flag-waving all over Washington. Dare I say it, it looked like a scene from the Middle East. But a lot of us Australians felt that, whatever his crimes – and they were truly hideous – jubilation was not the most appropriate response to a man being killed.

Then there is the conjecture that Osama was terminated when he could have been captured and trialled. While this is a better deal than he gave the victims on September 11, 2001, some Australian law experts have suggested that it would have been better to trial him. Perhaps the rule of law is what separates us from the law of Terror.

But if it's true that, while most Australians aren't upset about the fact that he's dead, many of us have reservations about the partying and the manner of his killing, this leads us to a simple question: why?

There are two major factors. The first is the memory of 911. It is cut deep into the hearts and minds of Americans, far moreso than it is ours. Many New Yorkers still feel a genuine trauma for an attack that was, after all, as senseless as it was cowardly and pathetic. Since that time, Osama has become a figure of hate and, with regular media interviews for survivors and relatives of the deceased, you can understand why. There is a belief shared by the US President that justice has finally been done.

The other factor is this – Americans make heroes out of people who take out the enemy. Most US war or cop shows have a hero who is ready to kill the bad guy. The regularity with which the killer in Blue Heelers meets his demise cannot hold a candle to CSI. What does this say about Americans – that their networks executives, after so much research, keep pumping out this kind of violence? Certainly not that Americans can't tell fact from fiction. But it does show that while Australians think of heroes as cool heads who only use force if absolutely necessary (think of Tom Croydon in Blue Heelers), Americans will be unsatisfied with anything but the killing of someone truly evil. Maybe this explains the celebrations on the streets of Washington on Sunday night. How different this is from the important Australian and New Zealander tradition of solemn grief and respect on ANZAC day.  It's the difference between making heroes out of soldier-assassins and Simpson and his donkey.

I think the Aussies have it about right. After all, what material thing has Osama's death (rather than trial) achieved, except for a poll boost to President Obama? Osama probably died just the way he wanted to – his fanatical followers will now think of him as a martyred warrior. The war in Afghanistan continues on as if nothing has happened.

Which leads to one final question – if NATO successfully removed Gadaffi, would it really bring democracy or even stop the violence in Libya?