Longreach in the outback

The first workshop for councillors, and some officers, from Longreach and surrounding Shires - council areas in central Queensland each larger than Wales - has gone very well. The day after Lin and I and John toured the township of Longreach courtesy of John Palmer, the Mayor, waving at and being greeted by fellow citizens as he passed - a world away from my metropolitan world, as was the small town's showcase exhibition, the Stockman's Hall of Fame, celebrating Australia's wild west, in historic terms hardly a century that changed the Australian landscape, formed a stereotype fast fading into modernity.

By CityCat to downtown Brisbane

So now we return to the bustle of the city, staying in Hamilton on the edge of Brisbane, heading this afternoon to the coast city of Mackay, for a second seminar, before returning to Brisbane from where we fly to New Zealand on Sunday. Also in Lonreach we visited the QUANTAS Founders' Museum - conspicuous from above and on the ground some of the retired airplanes that conquered the 'tyranny of distance' - historian Geoffrey Blainey's phrase for the vastness that was the Australian settlers' experience of their new continent.
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And just before countrywide local elections this Sunday, an op-ed piece from Richard Pine, living in Corfu, in The Irish Times, heralding the acrid blast of modernity upon the Hellenes and their economy, threatening much that Greeks and non-Greeks associate with 'Greekness':

....These elections are not about Greece’s image abroad, but about Greece’s image of itself.

As Kathimerini newspaper put it: “Every institution, every group and every individual will have to redefine itself with regard to society as a whole.” Talk of “the rebirth of a nation” is widespread. Papandreou declares, “We are changing Greece.” At the same time he insists, “There is no intrinsic flaw in the Greek character – it’s not in our DNA to have these problems.” But many critics insist that it is the very Greekness of that DNA that has created the problems.

As Athens-based journalist Nikos Konstandaras observes, “The underlying cause is the absence of personal discipline, which has cultivated a mentality that anyone could do what they liked.” There is a fundamental problem here – Konstandaras says, “this mindless tolerance is not a manifestation of democracy: it undermines it.” But to a vast number of Greeks, freedom and democracy are identical.

An index of this is the reaction to the new ban on smoking in public places. The law was introduced on September 1st but is widely regarded as an intrusion into personal liberty. As William Mallinson, a former British diplomat now lecturing at the Ionian University, puts it: “The price of freedom is chaos.”

Papandreou has acknowledged that “the crisis derives mainly from the lack of transparency in state power and public life, and from a clientelism that has corroded everything”.

The Brookings Institute in Washington reports that bribery, patronage and other corruption cost €20 billion per year, or 8 per cent of GDP. Much of the clientelism stems from the “sins of the father”: it was under Papandreou’s father Andreas, prime minister in the 1980s, that the flawed system was created by vested interests influencing political decisions. Ostensibly, and to a large extent truly, this was a reaction to the right-wing exclusion of the lower classes – urban and rural – following the civil war and under the military junta, between 1967 and 1974......

The recovery has been a personal crusade by George Papandreou to highlight the self-delusion his father’s crusade inadvertently encouraged: cronyism, over-employment in the civil service, excessive consumer spending. The programme on which recovery is based involves four key elements: a fundamental reform of public administration, including a reduction of the 1,034 municipalities to 340; locally-based initiatives to stimulate economic growth; privatisation of state companies such as Hellenic Railways; and liberalisation and deregulation of restricted professions, including lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, accountants, architects, truck drivers and taxis.......(extract)

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Wednesday late afternoon we arrive in Mackay to run a seminar on Thursday with councillors (plus Chief Executive) from the Regional Council. A hotel behind palms, shorter trees, shrubs and grasses along the Pacific shore. The taxi driver spun a mile journey from the airport to our hotel into a three mile fare - A$24 compared to a crow-flies fare of under A$10 - talking the while about the right pronunciation of the town - "Mack-i" or "Mack-a". "What do they make of climate change?" asked John "I think it's just the natural way of things. But who knows?". Later another driver, about to take us on the same run-around said "That's what the sat-nav says."
I have strong feelings about continued coal dependency, including a local economy's reliance on selling it to others. Parents who continue to deny or ignore the need to more than greenwash 'clean' coal may answer to their children and grandchildren.  Coal power costs the environment. It hinders the pursuit of renewable energy, yet a young men earning A$125k a year toiling 5 days on, 5 days off in the mining business of Queensland, can well feel pride spending and investing his wages on home and family; "Who needs education? Bastard climate change hippies." [See Stephen Schneider's recent book Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to save Earth's Climate - a review with good links, including this guide to debate with a climate change sceptic. Given that scientific thinking entails maintaining doubt and scepticism about the nature of truth you can see the problem. Political truth is made at the ballot box, which has no slot for shades of grey.]

China continued to be the largest and one of the fastest-growing coal markets in the world, with usage rising 9.6 percent to 1,537 mtoe in 2009, or 46.9% of total world coal consumption. The increase in coal use in China between 2008 and 2009 was greater than the total 2009 usage in Germany and Poland combined. In 2009, China became a net importer of coal for the first time, thanks to a surge in imports of steam coal (the grade used in boilers for electricity generation) from Australia, Indonesia, and Viet Nam. 

Colliers off Mackay

Once settled in our room, we stroll the shore - sandy soft and clean; on the tide line - leaves, twigs, small seawashed logs and coconut husks; not a plastic bottle or other human detritus. Flat Top and Round Top islands just offshore and further off the big colliers arriving at Dalrymple coal terminal further down the coast and departing for China. The sand crabs re-create on the beach, in fractal style, the spinifex landscape we've seen from the air around Longreach.

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A very funny piece in The Australian about aca-zombies by Joseph Gora and Andrew Whelan, co-editor of the forthcoming Zombies in the Academy.

The deadly hand of corporatism has drained all life from campus. Universities are increasingly populated by the undead: a listless population of academics, managers, administrators and students, all shuffling to the beat of the corporatist drum. Perhaps not surprisingly, the terrifying zombie plague that has swept through the sector is now the subject of serious scholarly attention (books, articles, conferences) as surviving academics investigate how we have descended into this miasma. So who or what exactly is responsible for tertiary zombification? Is there an antidote? Perhaps a clue lies in the recent independent movie Pontypool, in which the zombie virus is spread through endearments such as honey and sweetheart. The contagion is rapid and lethal, infecting all those who come into contact with such banal sweeteners. Similar lexical vacuity exists in today's university campuses, which have become hollowed-out spaces containing soulless buildings: food courts like any zombified shopping centre; eerily deserted libraries; and hi-tech lecture amphitheatres. In this bleak landscape the source of the zombie contagion lurks in the form of dead hand, mechanical speech....

The article is just a reminder that where the Victorians treated primary education as an instrument of the state, in pursuit of a workforce sufficiently literate to work in the new factories that were part of the industrial revolution, and secondary education expanded for less material motives after the second world war, now tertiary education - universities, academia - is treated by government and its business partners as the lead instrument of national economic survival in a globalised economy.

Studying this interest in the metaphor of zombies I was led to a recent publication called Zombie Economics by John Quiggin about the dead ideas that still walk among us and this led me to a most interesting overview of commentaries on the economic paradigm in which we are now entrapped - a piece by Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in The National Interest, of which he's a senior editor. Drezner's title takes up the zombie theme - First Bank of the Living Dead. Quiggin blogs a gentle rebuttal of Drezner's review, but the words I'm drawn to - not least because they are so lacking in the 'lexical vacuity' described by Andrew Whelan, are Keynes' - quoted at the end of Drezner's piece.

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war, is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed. John Maynard Keynes 1933

Meanwhile Tom Tomorrow's cartoon describes the credit industry going about it's daily work:

I wonder which society, which country, or which town or village will invent and maintain a way of living without growth without resorting to the terrible 20th century experiments of Nazi Germany and its allies or Soviet Russia, China and the failing experiment that grips the rest of us as the only alternative - turbo-charged global captalism.  I remind myself to read Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson, leading the economics steering group of the UK's Sustainable Development Commission.

I am inclined to agree with Max Born, the German physicist, who reckoned that the acceptance of a new quantum theory would occur only with the passing away of the old physics professors. The acceptance will await a new generation that starts off with a question mark. Fred Emery, one of my first employers

Back to the future ~ 18/12/10: Terry Eagleton on The death of universities.
18/01/11: Henri Girou on Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University: Higher Education in the Service of Democracy

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Pleasing news from Ano Korakiana. The greengrocers we thought was closed at the western end of Democracy Street has re-opened...

'...fully renovated owned and managed by Maria Binou, welcoming its first customers. At 7 last Saturday evening the Pappas gave his blessing to the opening of the store while Maria had prepared a buffet for guests with the support of her large family. The new shop will undoubtedly provide benefits to our village and deserves our support, along with the 2-3 others remaining ... in an area which up to three decades ago was served by 30 different stores.'

Down under

One thing you can do to pass nine night hours in transit at Dubai is to find a way out of the airport without taking a taxi or free hotel minibus, by finding how to buy a NOL card (Nol means 'fare' in Arabic) which is needed to access a public bus as well as a very efficient looking Metro which doesn't run until 7.00am, though, puzzlingly, we could see trains without passengers running to and fro above the terminal. It took us an hour to find anyone at a desk inside the concourse who could even give us the name 'NOL card' so that we knew more exactly what we sought, but after shunting between our arrival Terminal 3 where NOL cards were unavailable (as we were told when we tried to board a bus there) we took a free airport bus to Terminal 1 where for UAD20 (United Arab Emirates dirhams) - about £4 each -  a machine next to the bus stop efficiently took our paper money and dispensed the blue plastic cards we needed with receipts, and with some sense of achievement we boarded one of the half hourly bendy buses in company with a few of the night and day workers upon which Dubai's flagging economy depends. For twenty minutes our driver whirled through the dual carriage-ways and roundabouts along a placeless corridor of concrete constructions in the company of the many taxis that we'd seen converging with normal passengers on a long queue out of the airport, what sky we could see, like the start of Nueromancer, 'the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.' Now and then the bus speakers announced a stopping place like a machine part code, until of a sudden we were at Satwa Bus Station. Here I stopped to use the WC but found it locked, with a sign 'for staff only'. A man snoozing on a bench outside his shift, handed me his key, and for that charity I'd have spared the city, so much does a human touch make a place somewhere worth recall. In a couple of minutes, having strolled round the bus station - not a distinctive place (but for that key loan) - we gazed up to catch a glimpse of the Burj Khalifa, tallest building in the world and might have seen its towering spine of tiny lights in the orange gloom. We caught the next bus back to Terminal 3, having shared a few hours of transit doldrums.
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After a 21 hour flight including an additional 9 hours in Dubai and an hour in Singapore Lin and I were met by John at Melbourne Tullamarine,  to be driven tired but relaxed through the eucalyptus landscape to Bendigo diverting to the Malmsbury Bakery for a pie and tea, rain drumming on the corrugated iron roof, shooting from spouts off the street veranda and pouring along the cobbled gutter. In previous years I've seen this land parched, suffering 15 year's drought, all but indigenous trees wilting or become leafless skeletons, the sky cloudless blue, dry creeks, remaining farm ponds dry or holding a pool of borrowed water below their parched banks. Now the skies were grey, the air cool,  even slightly chilly, the upper part of mount Macedon hidden by low cloud, screen wipers working steadily, cars throwing up spray. It was 2.15 in the morning for us, and hardly eleven in the morning in John and Annie's house. "It's more like Corfu rain than English rain" said Lin. Tomorrow we head north past Brisbane for the first seminar on Mayor-CEO working relations in the hot weather of  outback Longreach in northern Queensland.
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Interesting news via June Samaras of green developments in Anavras in central northern Greece and I see that Jim Potts, quoting a depressing tale of ill-tiding about the Hellenic economy in The Daily Telegraph of 26 October by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (plus at least 114 comments), wonders how much of this is alarmism - κινδυνολογία. Well indeed. Keynes, or was it Galbraith, or Ezra Solomon (thanks Google) or - whoever -  suggested economics was invented to make astrology look like science? None of us knows very much as the king knows who summons his wise men for advice in difficult times. I wonder if this is how things felt in Europe in the 1920s; the bonfire of the European democracies that Mazower describes so well in the first half of Europe's dark century. (See: IFS disagreement with the Coalition on interpretation of COINS in aftermath of CSR 2010)
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It's 0255 EST Sunday morning here in Bendigo...no lights on as I know it enough now to get round blind, though without my specs I wondered momentarily at the tiny lights of our tooth brushes glowing greenly in the dark, hearing low hum of the fridge, then the lights of our laptops on the sitting room table, ceaseless rain making white noise around the sleeping house. My body's fooled about the hour. Is it tea-time in England - four or five pm - or supper time in Greece? Eightish and already dark again with the earth turning towards our dawn. Who like us lies dead to the world? Who's bustling about their work? I'm somewhere between. We're all up in another three hours to head to Melbourne and fly north to the Queensland outback.