Reason to secretly hate Aussies no. 295

Their winter is better than our summer.

Bastards.

The power of positive thinking

Ten days sampling the Aussie media has left me pondering the power of positive thinking.

I recall how some years ago, ITN news presenter Martyn Lewis was laughed at for suggesting that British news was too negative and could benefit from being lightened up with positive stories. Images of front pages about cats saved from trees filled the heads of his cynical colleagues and they chuckled.

I did too.

But it is true that the British media environment is a profoundly negative and mean-spirited one. The Irish media climate is little different.

I've noticed this especially here in Australia, where they are prepared to put a story about a medical discovery or a community initiative on the front page without apology.

In some other places I've been, the positive news can seem seriously parochial. Israeli papers see little beyond their own siege mentality, as if everything on the planet related to the Middle East or Jewish affairs, even when the story is something light-hearted or positive, for example.

But Australia is a heavyweight country with a large, cosmopolitan, travelled, multicultural society. And if they can make positive news work, both on the airwaves and in print, then why couldn't we?

I'm slightly dreading returning to the land of scandal as substance and negativity news, now. I fear the face of Ireland I'll see in our media will seem scowling and mean in comparison to the optimism - tempered by reality and proper coverage of current events and affairs, of course - that is expressed in Australian media.

And without wanting to seem simplistic, I wonder if the media mentalities of both nations can perhaps be mapped onto the nature of the peoples who read them?

Are Australians outward-looking and positive can-do people inherently and that is expressed through their media? Or does the media perhaps encourage such an outlook in those who view and read it?

And by contrast, what does our own sour, negatively troped news say about us?

Uluru - big in Japan

What's wrong with Uluru?

On the one hand, nothing.
It's a big rock in the middle of the desert, just like it has been for hundreds of millions of years.

On the other hand, it's a bit odd when you can go days and not see a single Anangu, or Aboriginal person in the area.

All the hotels seem to be staffed primarily by Koreans. The tour guides are all white Aussies, with the exception of the dozens of Japanese guides who exist to ferry the hundreds of Japanese tourists seeking to climb the rock daily.

Of course the locals don't like people to climb the rock. Not that the Japanese give a shit. They're not interest in Anangu culture (just as well, as the locals and their culture are quite hard to encounter out here), they just want to conquer the big red rock.

Everything is preposterously priced, as you might expect in the middle of four deserts. But that is disappointing given the poor level of service going on.

I'm not like those pampered Yank tourists who go to Third World countries and whinge non-stop about the conditions. Really, I'm not.

But this is Oz, and the prices are eye-watering: $45 just for a lift to go the four kilometres from the accommodation to the rock and back in a bus. And that's the cheapest way to do it. Tours (with 22 year old Sydney born guides reading from scripts) and food (mostly fast) are also four times the price they ought to be.

Continually, I'm hearing and reading the lip-service paid to embettering the Aboriginals of the area with bemusement.

Why isn't there a college out here to teach the locals how to work their own land? How to run accommodation and tours without Whitey as middleman to claim all the profit? Why do they still live off handouts in a place that's clearly minting money?

And why does all the staff in the hotels and tour firms rotate with such frequency that a person here for 12 months is considered a veteran?

Uluru may be big in Japan. But for me, despite its awesome beauty, it has been a disappointment.

Australia could learn a lot from some so-called Third World countries about how to assist indigenous populations rather than simply throwing them a bone like token land ownership then going on to rape their history and culture for tourist bucks.

Photos to follow once I reach Melbourne.

Losing interest in Lisbon

I'm losing interest in Lisbon.

The right answer is so obviously 'no', that at this stage my only real interest in the result is analysing the 'yes' vote as a headcount of how many blindly-led party apparatchiks and buffoons who do what politicians tell them to exist in the country.

Anyone who spent anytime actually reading the Lisbon Treaty (no easy task, let me warn you), or the referendum wording, knows that it's got to be turned down. It's dangerous, impenetrable gibberish we're being ordered to sign or else.

There may well be enough simple followers and easily-bullied people in the country to carry a referendum though, which is a depressing thought.

So I've decided I'm not voting. I'm fecking off to Australia until this craic is over. But if Ireland votes in favour of Lisbon, I might just stay there. (That's not a threat intended to sway your vote in either direction, incidentally.)

Remember, whichever way you vote, make sure to make your voice heard. As we say in the Skinner household: Vote early, Vote often!

Right, anyone seen my hat with the dangly corks?

Supreme Court ruling today

Lost among all the important events of the day, like the Sopranos finale, was an interesting ruling from the Supreme Court.

The birth mother of an infant was permitted the right to continue to appeal for guardianship and joint custody of her fourteen month old child, which the father wishes to remove to Australia for at least a year.

The father, who is in a gay relationship, had sought to take the child to the ends of the earth with his gay lover, but the Supreme Court has ruled in a majority 2-1 decision that he must at least wait until the mother's court appeals to have the rights to see and know her own child have been heard.

Ridiculous? Of course it is. No mother would ever be treated like that in Ireland. It never happened. Only it did, sort of. Swap the genders around and you have the real story.

What I find bizarre is that the father, as this RTE report reveals, has had to go all the way to the Supreme Court just to be permitted the right to ASK for rights to know his own child, before the child's mother and her lesbian lover whisk the infant off to Australia.

One day, perhaps, we might eventually see some equity in parenting in this country. But that dissenting judge's opinion in the Supreme Court today indicates that it won't be any day soon.