Somewhere over the rainbow.

The Good the Bad and the Ugly of Australia.

Australia is a bit fractured at the moment. Actually that is not quite true; the hottest island nation on earth has been fractured since Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 first set his eyes on the west coast and in European terms discovered Australia, although he didn’t know it at the time. Many were to follow him and so it began.

There is a myth in Australia – indeed the world – that James Cook, perhaps the greatest explorer known to man was the first but it took him another century and then he ‘discovered’ the eastern seaboard. However let us not get into semantics here. Both were incredible seamen although it is acknowledged that Cook was paramount in his exploration of the world. He also happens to be a hero of mine so I’m not interested in a discussion – informed or not – on that matter.

When I say Australia is in a bit fractured at the moment I have to refer to politics for a brief moment.

We have just seen the removal of our Prime Minister in what could only be termed pathetic and desperate terms. Like the little children they are members of the Liberal party worried about the next election and their wonderful $200,000 a year salary threw PM Turnbull to the wind.

Admittedly he was a bit of a loser having been elected with a multitude of stern promises to make the nation proud but in the end gave in to the entire conservative, green, gay, you name it faction and thus we became a government without policy. Mind you the only real damage to Turnbull is his ego. The man, like many blood sucking politicians is a multi millionaire so he’ll probably sulk for some months and then count his monetary trust accounts. The abhorrence at our political system at the moment is to put it mildly disgust. On the other hand Donald Trump congratulated our new Prime Minister on his ascendancy so all is well with the world, in Trump terms that is.

Now no more politics if I can avoid it. Problem is the buggers consume our day to day living, no matter what nation you live in.

The people of Australia are worried about their future. As a member of the older generation I’m selfish enough to be thankful I won’t see the havoc my generation and those before it has wreaked on this magnificent land. Frankly I bleed for my grandchildren. They are facing a world where a university degree is becoming meaningless unless you are entering the medical or scientific fields. And the universities are to blame. Their greed in wanting more and more students and enrolling them in courses where there are few if any jobs once the students have their hard earned degree knows no bounds.

More and more Australians are becoming so cynical they have become disappointed in the nation as a whole.

We are an expensive nation to live in. Prices are high and becoming higher as corporate Australian gouges more and more money from our meagre purses. The median house price in Sydney is AU$1,111,124 and young people who giving up and moving on. Either out of Sydney or Australia. Last year 25,000 Australians packed up and moved to New Zealand.

The state in which I reside has the highest electricity prices in the world and we are a nation blessed with probably more sunshine than any other. Why then have the energy companies resisted so strongly alternative forms of energy – think solar and wind. I’ll tell you why. Because that would mean investing in new forms of power and they don’t want to spend money when they can rip their clients off and the government is too weak to take them on and challenge their greed. Sorry a bit of politics again. Mind you greed feeds on greed so perhaps the politicians don’t want to damage their energy company share portfolio. I told you we were becoming more and more cynical.

And then there is corruption. Let us be honest here. The first settlers in Australian were convicts who were thrown into the holds of aging wooden ships over 200 years ago, shackled and fed bread and water, transported 10,574 miles and when they arrived in Australia were told to ‘get on with it’. Their lives were truly horrendous. Many convicts were either skilled tradesmen or farmers who had been convicted for trivial crimes and sentenced to seven years transportation to the new British colony of Australia. Many new arrivals were also sick or unfit for work after three months at sea and the conditions of healthy convicts only deteriorated with hard labour and poor sustenance in the settlement. The food situation reached crisis point in 1790 and the Second Fleet which finally arrived in June 1790 had lost a quarter of its “passengers” through sickness. Many of the soldiers who accompanied them were by and large just as bad as the convicts. Slowly but surely they became decent citizens and we became a highly prosperous nation

I’ve painted a fairly disolusioned picture. The bad and the ugly. But there is good in Australia. Some place boast the best beaches in the world but I might suggest people take a good look at Ningaloo Reef of the NW coast of Australia. The beaches in that area of the world  are pristine white and stretch for thousands of kilometres. In general people are polite and generous. We are a proud nation and will support any nation in need, even those whose leaders are corrupt although there is growing discontent about these parasitic leaders and people are starting to say funding should be more controlled but aid agencies – but then they are another story.

And when you get to my age and see what might lie ahead you think back on the past half century and think “we live in a wonderful country.” That is the GOOD. Bye for now.