Published Indaily, October 2010
WHEN it comes to choosing friendships, we generally look for people who are similar to ourselves, who see life broadly the same way, and who know something of what it is to be like us.
We tend not to mix with people who don’t want to know us, or don’t care what happens to us.
It can take just one factor to bring us together.
Membership of a footy club will do it, enough for people to claim a bond even if they have nothing much else in common.
I sure smiled, for example, when I first heard the line about Port Power members coming in two types, those who drive Mercedes and those who steal them.
There you go, a shared love of Port and Mercedes.
Personally, I am not a clubby person.
My own preference is for low-intensity acquaintanceships, just chummy enough to get the social juices flowing, but not so much that personal closeness becomes too intrusive and demanding.
Which is one of the reasons why I like pubs.
People in front bars are not usually looking for anything apart from a drink and the company of whoever happens to be there, a sense of casual bon homie with no expectations.
A bar is also a place you can leave, with no obligations, when you’ve had your fill of either the people or the drink.
Not long ago, I was in the Railway Hotel, Port Melbourne, when into the bar blew an ancient barfly who everyone called Oodles, a thirsty mouth of missing teeth.
The barmaid winked: ``Quick. Better get you a drink, Oodles. Don’t ever want to be giving you mouth to mouth.’’
Grins all around. Oodles was among mates.
Most friendships, though, arise through the workplace. Certainly the people I still count as friends I met through work, and we bonded later over a drink in the pub.
The workplace bonds are especially evident whenever a business closes for good.
When Mitsubishi fell over at Lonsdale and Tonsley Park, the workers expressed their grief, not just for the lost jobs but much more for the lost friendships.
Exactly the same reaction occurred when Bridgestone closed its Salisbury tyre factory last April and 600 workers were given notice.
They gathered afterwards at the Brahma Lodge and Old Spot hotels for an emotional farewell.
For many, after years of working together, it would be the last time they saw each other. They were not drowning their sorrows at the loss of jobs, so much as celebrating their friendships one final time together.
Whatever differences they had were forgotten. They were simply a bunch of workers in the same situation, suffering the same fate and united in facing an uncertain future.
It’s said that you are what you do as a job. True, until you don’t have a job, and then you are better defined by the friends who remain.
A shame it takes the closure of a workplace before we realise that a common bond exists in our shared humanity.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Published Indaily, September 2010
Mystery of The Treasures Wall
THE State Library is somewhere I visit even if I have nothing to research. It’s a great place to kill an hour or so, especially when the rain is pelting down outside.
I head directly up the stairs past the portrait of suffragette Catherine Helen Spence, to The Treasures Wall, which is always a revelation.
An array of 20 display cases, The Treasures Wall offers a glimpse of the library’s rare collection of manuscripts, artefacts, photographs and maps.
A while back there was an exhibition of the South Australian experience of World War I, which complemented an Australian War Memorial travelling exhibition of the Anzac Victoria Crosses won at Gallipoli.
Another exhibition included material on Goyder’s Line, surveyed in 1865 by the SA Surveyor-General George Goyder. By tracking the saltbush margin across SA, he determined that north of the line the rainfall was too unreliable for permanent agriculture, which still holds true.
The display said Goyder was born in 1826 in Liverpool, England, and migrated to Australia when he was 22.
Therefore he probably had the same Scouse accent as The Beatles. It pleases me to think that Goyder, a dour disciplinarian with a sextant, had an adenoidal voice like Ringo’s.
Scattered around in front of the exhibition were 20 or so uni-type students, mostly Asians. They were using low, wooden stools that doubled as seats or as tables if you sat on the carpet, as most preferred.
All had open laptop computers. Totally focused on the screen, very little conversation occurred, an exchanged word from time to time but overwhelmingly there was an atmosphere of studious intent.
I wondered why they were out here on the floor when they could be inside the main study area at a comfortable desk?
A mystery, and I sat on a bench to think about it.
Nearby, a young woman in a musk-pink jumper was sitting on the floor and talking into a mobile phone, her dark hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail.
She was speaking super rapidly, so fast that it was hard to keep up. The sacred silence of libraries is not what it used to be.
What had happened, as best I could tell, was the power had been cut off at her West Beach flat and she was trying to get it restored.
The cause of the outage was a puzzle. A flatmate was mentioned, a possible culprit.
From her laptop the girl read out an account number, and she had to repeat it more slowly. She was made to hold the line.
I took my chance. ``Excuse me, why is everyone sitting out here and not inside?’’
``Because the Wi-Fi’s best here,’’ she replied curtly.
Ah. Wireless internet.
The webolution: The State Library, in crossing the cyber line, has become a Wi-Fi hotspot within its own portals.
Chances are, some of these kids were researching The Treasures Wall online when the real thing was there just in front of them.
Think how much easier Goyder would have found it to drawn his Line with Google Maps.
Mystery of The Treasures Wall
THE State Library is somewhere I visit even if I have nothing to research. It’s a great place to kill an hour or so, especially when the rain is pelting down outside.
I head directly up the stairs past the portrait of suffragette Catherine Helen Spence, to The Treasures Wall, which is always a revelation.
An array of 20 display cases, The Treasures Wall offers a glimpse of the library’s rare collection of manuscripts, artefacts, photographs and maps.
A while back there was an exhibition of the South Australian experience of World War I, which complemented an Australian War Memorial travelling exhibition of the Anzac Victoria Crosses won at Gallipoli.
Another exhibition included material on Goyder’s Line, surveyed in 1865 by the SA Surveyor-General George Goyder. By tracking the saltbush margin across SA, he determined that north of the line the rainfall was too unreliable for permanent agriculture, which still holds true.
The display said Goyder was born in 1826 in Liverpool, England, and migrated to Australia when he was 22.
Therefore he probably had the same Scouse accent as The Beatles. It pleases me to think that Goyder, a dour disciplinarian with a sextant, had an adenoidal voice like Ringo’s.
Scattered around in front of the exhibition were 20 or so uni-type students, mostly Asians. They were using low, wooden stools that doubled as seats or as tables if you sat on the carpet, as most preferred.
All had open laptop computers. Totally focused on the screen, very little conversation occurred, an exchanged word from time to time but overwhelmingly there was an atmosphere of studious intent.
I wondered why they were out here on the floor when they could be inside the main study area at a comfortable desk?
A mystery, and I sat on a bench to think about it.
Nearby, a young woman in a musk-pink jumper was sitting on the floor and talking into a mobile phone, her dark hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail.
She was speaking super rapidly, so fast that it was hard to keep up. The sacred silence of libraries is not what it used to be.
What had happened, as best I could tell, was the power had been cut off at her West Beach flat and she was trying to get it restored.
The cause of the outage was a puzzle. A flatmate was mentioned, a possible culprit.
From her laptop the girl read out an account number, and she had to repeat it more slowly. She was made to hold the line.
I took my chance. ``Excuse me, why is everyone sitting out here and not inside?’’
``Because the Wi-Fi’s best here,’’ she replied curtly.
Ah. Wireless internet.
The webolution: The State Library, in crossing the cyber line, has become a Wi-Fi hotspot within its own portals.
Chances are, some of these kids were researching The Treasures Wall online when the real thing was there just in front of them.
Think how much easier Goyder would have found it to drawn his Line with Google Maps.
Published Indaily, September 2010
SOME Sundays, when the season is soft and airy as it is now, I walk into Chinatown for a relaxed Asian lunch.
It’s always a pleasant hive of activity, a slightly chaotic spectacle of Asian symbols and faces, where the restaurants compete for space with the hair salons and mobile phone sellers.
In the afternoon light, mellow and soothing, the afternoon just drifts along. Social vitality, as often as not, comes from people being concentrated into a restricted area and immersing them in cooking aromas.
One of the best aspects is the Chinese have yet to figure out how to charge for alcohol, for which I am grateful.
The booze mark-up generally is nothing like the usual rip-off at other restaurants, suggesting that the Chinese place a priority on the food more than the drink.
The downside, however, is you can sit there for ages after ordering a Tsingtao beer before it is actually brought to you, as though the idea of drinking ahead of the food’s arrival is incomprehensible to the Chinese mind.
Warning: Only drink beer direct from the stubbie in a Chinatown restaurant and never from a glass. Because the beer goes flat almost as soon as it is poured into a glass, which suggests the glassware is not washed separately in clean water but in the same greasy dishwater that was used for the chicken stir-fry bowls.
Chinatown restaurants serve the food I cannot cook, or cannot be bothered attempting.
They are also home of the so-called ``cheap and cheerful’’ meal, the places where you don’t need an expense account unless the person doing the ordering thinks she is feeding not just the two of you but the entire 7th regiment. Then it’s not cheap.
I generally allow others to order and really appreciate it, since the menus are too long for me to be bothered with. The ritual of choosing seems like too much work when you are only going to be hungry again in half an hour.
There is a set routine: First, those who order always give the menu a thorough going over, which could take half an hour; they fret that the specials board written in Chinese characters must contain secret treasures known only to the Chinese; get antsy about the slow or inept service by the young students-cum-waiters; mercilessly critique the food when it’s served, while fuming that the diners at nearby tables have definitely ordered better dishes; and spend the final half-hour forensically examining the bill in case they have been diddled.
I more or less accept the fuss in my stride as part of the yin-yang theatrics of dining out in Chinatown.
But there are quite a few places there where you would not bother going if a great coffee and hygienic toilets are what you are after.
I am an expert at eating in Chinese restaurants but know nothing about running one. The Chinese are expert at running restaurants, but care little about keeping clean toilets.
SOME Sundays, when the season is soft and airy as it is now, I walk into Chinatown for a relaxed Asian lunch.
It’s always a pleasant hive of activity, a slightly chaotic spectacle of Asian symbols and faces, where the restaurants compete for space with the hair salons and mobile phone sellers.
In the afternoon light, mellow and soothing, the afternoon just drifts along. Social vitality, as often as not, comes from people being concentrated into a restricted area and immersing them in cooking aromas.
One of the best aspects is the Chinese have yet to figure out how to charge for alcohol, for which I am grateful.
The booze mark-up generally is nothing like the usual rip-off at other restaurants, suggesting that the Chinese place a priority on the food more than the drink.
The downside, however, is you can sit there for ages after ordering a Tsingtao beer before it is actually brought to you, as though the idea of drinking ahead of the food’s arrival is incomprehensible to the Chinese mind.
Warning: Only drink beer direct from the stubbie in a Chinatown restaurant and never from a glass. Because the beer goes flat almost as soon as it is poured into a glass, which suggests the glassware is not washed separately in clean water but in the same greasy dishwater that was used for the chicken stir-fry bowls.
Chinatown restaurants serve the food I cannot cook, or cannot be bothered attempting.
They are also home of the so-called ``cheap and cheerful’’ meal, the places where you don’t need an expense account unless the person doing the ordering thinks she is feeding not just the two of you but the entire 7th regiment. Then it’s not cheap.
I generally allow others to order and really appreciate it, since the menus are too long for me to be bothered with. The ritual of choosing seems like too much work when you are only going to be hungry again in half an hour.
There is a set routine: First, those who order always give the menu a thorough going over, which could take half an hour; they fret that the specials board written in Chinese characters must contain secret treasures known only to the Chinese; get antsy about the slow or inept service by the young students-cum-waiters; mercilessly critique the food when it’s served, while fuming that the diners at nearby tables have definitely ordered better dishes; and spend the final half-hour forensically examining the bill in case they have been diddled.
I more or less accept the fuss in my stride as part of the yin-yang theatrics of dining out in Chinatown.
But there are quite a few places there where you would not bother going if a great coffee and hygienic toilets are what you are after.
I am an expert at eating in Chinese restaurants but know nothing about running one. The Chinese are expert at running restaurants, but care little about keeping clean toilets.
Published Sunday Mail, Adelaide, September 12, 2010.
YEARS ago, the wine writer Phillip White and I lunched at a restaurant that had butcher’s paper for tablecloths.
We had a discussion about the different Adelaide networks – arts, legal, political, criminal and so on – and over the next few minutes we quickly had covered the paper with name after name after name.
Certain people were underlined or identified by different asterisks, then connected by circles and arrows to link the groups they came from.
Joining the dots, soon we had produced an arty effect in a Bruce Petty cartoonish way.
We had to ask the restaurant owner for another sheet of paper. She gave us one of those looks, as if paper grew on trees.
On and on we went, until two sheets were completely covered and the owner refused to provide a third.
I cannot say there was much scientific method involved.
Didn’t such-and-such have an affair with so-and-so? Yep, and with him and him and her as well ... and we’d be off on another tangent.
Phillip and I came to no specific conclusion apart from compiling a list of the people we both knew and agreeing we knew a lot of the same people.
What we also found was that simply making connections did not necessarily lead to anywhere at all, and indeed could be fairly misleading.
For instance, it can be shown that Phillip White is connected to the sacking of the Whitlam government, something he denies.
Starting with Phillip, I can quickly run through the wine fraternity to the venerable palate of Brian Barry, whose horse Century Miss won the Golden Slipper in 1979; Century Miss was trained at Glenelg by Bart Cummings, who also trained Gold and Black to win the 1977 Melbourne Cup, which was presented by an hilariously drunk Governor-General Sir John Kerr, who sacked the Whitlam government.
There you go.
At work here, is the principle of Six Degrees of Separation, the idea that if you are one step away from each person you know and extend through all connections as well, then it can be shown that everyone on earth is linked by no more than six steps.
Given there are 6.8 billion people on the planet, and that I am admittedly bad at remembering names, I find six degrees to be a stretch.
In Adelaide, though, it is more believable. Three degrees even.
What was the point of our lunchtime scrawls? None that I can recall. Except I think we invented Facebook.
People occasionally invite me to be their Facebook ``friend’’ and generally I accept, including with the people I barely know or didn’t even know I knew.
They are neither welcome nor unwelcome, since I almost never check Facebook.
No offence, but having never had more friends at the one time than I could count on one hand, I am finding it difficult to get my head around the idea of so many new, invisible friends now entering my life.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
YEARS ago, the wine writer Phillip White and I lunched at a restaurant that had butcher’s paper for tablecloths.
We had a discussion about the different Adelaide networks – arts, legal, political, criminal and so on – and over the next few minutes we quickly had covered the paper with name after name after name.
Certain people were underlined or identified by different asterisks, then connected by circles and arrows to link the groups they came from.
Joining the dots, soon we had produced an arty effect in a Bruce Petty cartoonish way.
We had to ask the restaurant owner for another sheet of paper. She gave us one of those looks, as if paper grew on trees.
On and on we went, until two sheets were completely covered and the owner refused to provide a third.
I cannot say there was much scientific method involved.
Didn’t such-and-such have an affair with so-and-so? Yep, and with him and him and her as well ... and we’d be off on another tangent.
Phillip and I came to no specific conclusion apart from compiling a list of the people we both knew and agreeing we knew a lot of the same people.
What we also found was that simply making connections did not necessarily lead to anywhere at all, and indeed could be fairly misleading.
For instance, it can be shown that Phillip White is connected to the sacking of the Whitlam government, something he denies.
Starting with Phillip, I can quickly run through the wine fraternity to the venerable palate of Brian Barry, whose horse Century Miss won the Golden Slipper in 1979; Century Miss was trained at Glenelg by Bart Cummings, who also trained Gold and Black to win the 1977 Melbourne Cup, which was presented by an hilariously drunk Governor-General Sir John Kerr, who sacked the Whitlam government.
There you go.
At work here, is the principle of Six Degrees of Separation, the idea that if you are one step away from each person you know and extend through all connections as well, then it can be shown that everyone on earth is linked by no more than six steps.
Given there are 6.8 billion people on the planet, and that I am admittedly bad at remembering names, I find six degrees to be a stretch.
In Adelaide, though, it is more believable. Three degrees even.
What was the point of our lunchtime scrawls? None that I can recall. Except I think we invented Facebook.
People occasionally invite me to be their Facebook ``friend’’ and generally I accept, including with the people I barely know or didn’t even know I knew.
They are neither welcome nor unwelcome, since I almost never check Facebook.
No offence, but having never had more friends at the one time than I could count on one hand, I am finding it difficult to get my head around the idea of so many new, invisible friends now entering my life.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
Published Sunday Mail, Adelaide, August 29, 2010
THE street where I live at Wayville is used by cheapskates who park there for free and walk the five minutes around the corner to attend the different events at the Adelaide Showground.
From my front window, I can usually tell from the look of the passersby, their ages and how they are dressed, what event is on.
Some are easy to pick.
The Caravan and Camping Show sees the greybeards with Swiss Army knives holstered to their straining girths; the Bridal Ideas Expo gets the Sex and The City desperados; anything to do with cars and extreme horsepower draws in the mulletheads and their lookalike boys; the Garden Expo pulls the ABC types; and of course Glendi attracts the Greeks.
The Body, Mind and Psychic Expo sucks in mostly women who have a need to get in touch with their inner selves. Whatever their other problems, apparently a couple of hours of astrology and tarot can lift their spirits.
The Pregnancy, Baby & Children's Expo is the scariest. You can’t move around Wayville for the bulging bellies.
I find it unsettling to see so many heavily impregnated women walking the streets at the same time, resembling a scene from a sci-fi movie, all heading towards a mass incubator in the Goyder Pavilion.
Speaking of which, Sexpo was staged at the Showground a while back. Touted as the ``world’s largest adult lifestyle show’’, I spent the week leading up to it in a high state of anticipation.
But if you were expecting to see trashy blondes and the plastic raincoat brigade roaming the streets, you’d be disappointed. They looked like the same DIY mob who attend the Sunday Mail Home Living Expo.
The Royal Adelaide Show is the big one starting next Friday (September 3). For a whole week, Wayville is besieged as tens of thousands of people head to the Showground.
The excitement on the kids’ faces is alone worth the price of admission.
Then, at day’s end, everyone returns loaded down by showbags, the kids are armed with plastic swords and replica military weapons, and the littlies are weepy from exhaustion or throwing a tanty.
Mum and dad are at the end of their tethers, too, footsore and in such filthy moods that you can read in their faces what they are thinking: Never, ever again!
It gets worse. Back at the car, they find a council parking ticket stuck under the wiper – $21 for exceeding the two hour limit or $34 for parking in a Residential Permit Zone – and are beside themselves with white-knuckled rage.
They go off their nuts, scream at the kids and screech the tyres as they roar off. Better, if you ask me, than sideshow alley.
Not just the odd offender, either, but scores are caught each day, as if the parking signs located on every other stobie pole somehow do not apply to them. Such dills.
So, on behalf of all Unley ratepayers, thanks for the fine donations and enjoy the Show.
THE street where I live at Wayville is used by cheapskates who park there for free and walk the five minutes around the corner to attend the different events at the Adelaide Showground.
From my front window, I can usually tell from the look of the passersby, their ages and how they are dressed, what event is on.
Some are easy to pick.
The Caravan and Camping Show sees the greybeards with Swiss Army knives holstered to their straining girths; the Bridal Ideas Expo gets the Sex and The City desperados; anything to do with cars and extreme horsepower draws in the mulletheads and their lookalike boys; the Garden Expo pulls the ABC types; and of course Glendi attracts the Greeks.
The Body, Mind and Psychic Expo sucks in mostly women who have a need to get in touch with their inner selves. Whatever their other problems, apparently a couple of hours of astrology and tarot can lift their spirits.
The Pregnancy, Baby & Children's Expo is the scariest. You can’t move around Wayville for the bulging bellies.
I find it unsettling to see so many heavily impregnated women walking the streets at the same time, resembling a scene from a sci-fi movie, all heading towards a mass incubator in the Goyder Pavilion.
Speaking of which, Sexpo was staged at the Showground a while back. Touted as the ``world’s largest adult lifestyle show’’, I spent the week leading up to it in a high state of anticipation.
But if you were expecting to see trashy blondes and the plastic raincoat brigade roaming the streets, you’d be disappointed. They looked like the same DIY mob who attend the Sunday Mail Home Living Expo.
The Royal Adelaide Show is the big one starting next Friday (September 3). For a whole week, Wayville is besieged as tens of thousands of people head to the Showground.
The excitement on the kids’ faces is alone worth the price of admission.
Then, at day’s end, everyone returns loaded down by showbags, the kids are armed with plastic swords and replica military weapons, and the littlies are weepy from exhaustion or throwing a tanty.
Mum and dad are at the end of their tethers, too, footsore and in such filthy moods that you can read in their faces what they are thinking: Never, ever again!
It gets worse. Back at the car, they find a council parking ticket stuck under the wiper – $21 for exceeding the two hour limit or $34 for parking in a Residential Permit Zone – and are beside themselves with white-knuckled rage.
They go off their nuts, scream at the kids and screech the tyres as they roar off. Better, if you ask me, than sideshow alley.
Not just the odd offender, either, but scores are caught each day, as if the parking signs located on every other stobie pole somehow do not apply to them. Such dills.
So, on behalf of all Unley ratepayers, thanks for the fine donations and enjoy the Show.
Sunday Mail, Adelaide, August 15, 2010
SOME days, I feel as though I have been embedded in life as a stranger, that I am here purely as a confused observer not as an active participant, and at some point I should call it quits and resume my normal life.
I always feel this way during election campaigns.
Certain stages of my professional life have been spent at close quarters with the political process and not once have I come away feeling uplifted.
Sure, there are plenty of people in politics who are decent and honest, but quite a few who are not.
Trouble is, even the best of them are consumed by the political game. The with-us or against-us, the hunter or the hunted.
Immersed in politics in the raw, the dirty tricks, the back-stabbing, the attention seeking, MPs become obsessed with themselves. They just do.
The sense of an egotistical slugfest is reinforced by the media. Fair enough, too, since that is how the game is played.
So it comes down to Julia Gillard versus Tony Abbott, a contest depicted by and large as a clash of two personalities, rather than as a face-off between Labor and Liberal policies.
Of course there are differences between them. She has a pointy nose; he has wingnut ears. But scratch the surface and I don’t see much difference campaign-wise.
Each is trying to occupy the same middle ground, yet not enough space is available for both of them.
Is gender an issue in this campaign? You bet it is.
At Probus clubs across the nation, women are tut-tutting at Julia’s changeable hair tincture and thinking she really ought to find a new hairdresser.
Moving forward, Julia and Tony appear to genuinely like one another personally, an unsettling sense that he is her kind of guy.
He says he likes strong women. She is that, but what does she see in him? A lot of people are asking the same question and, no, I don’t know the answer either.
The electorate is always looking for something worth voting for. What this might be depends on who is doing the voting, but policies are often a secondary consideration, I think.
The parties are not uniform in their policy leanings anyway. The gulf between the internal factions can be wider at times than the differences between the parties. Take the asylum seeker issue. And the Kevin Rudd coup de grace.
Democracy places a touching faith in the electorate, en masse, to get it right. This may be grossly over-estimating the potential of the electorate.
But the defining principle of democracy is that voters, when they become sufficiently fed up, can toss out the government.
Then, perversely, we end up with a new government that almost half the population voted against.
Still, everyone accepts the result. Even the losers recognise the right to govern of those they did not elect. In the aftermath there is no screaming mob, no bloodshed or teargas in the streets.
Why the hell not? I am only asking.
SOME days, I feel as though I have been embedded in life as a stranger, that I am here purely as a confused observer not as an active participant, and at some point I should call it quits and resume my normal life.
I always feel this way during election campaigns.
Certain stages of my professional life have been spent at close quarters with the political process and not once have I come away feeling uplifted.
Sure, there are plenty of people in politics who are decent and honest, but quite a few who are not.
Trouble is, even the best of them are consumed by the political game. The with-us or against-us, the hunter or the hunted.
Immersed in politics in the raw, the dirty tricks, the back-stabbing, the attention seeking, MPs become obsessed with themselves. They just do.
The sense of an egotistical slugfest is reinforced by the media. Fair enough, too, since that is how the game is played.
So it comes down to Julia Gillard versus Tony Abbott, a contest depicted by and large as a clash of two personalities, rather than as a face-off between Labor and Liberal policies.
Of course there are differences between them. She has a pointy nose; he has wingnut ears. But scratch the surface and I don’t see much difference campaign-wise.
Each is trying to occupy the same middle ground, yet not enough space is available for both of them.
Is gender an issue in this campaign? You bet it is.
At Probus clubs across the nation, women are tut-tutting at Julia’s changeable hair tincture and thinking she really ought to find a new hairdresser.
Moving forward, Julia and Tony appear to genuinely like one another personally, an unsettling sense that he is her kind of guy.
He says he likes strong women. She is that, but what does she see in him? A lot of people are asking the same question and, no, I don’t know the answer either.
The electorate is always looking for something worth voting for. What this might be depends on who is doing the voting, but policies are often a secondary consideration, I think.
The parties are not uniform in their policy leanings anyway. The gulf between the internal factions can be wider at times than the differences between the parties. Take the asylum seeker issue. And the Kevin Rudd coup de grace.
Democracy places a touching faith in the electorate, en masse, to get it right. This may be grossly over-estimating the potential of the electorate.
But the defining principle of democracy is that voters, when they become sufficiently fed up, can toss out the government.
Then, perversely, we end up with a new government that almost half the population voted against.
Still, everyone accepts the result. Even the losers recognise the right to govern of those they did not elect. In the aftermath there is no screaming mob, no bloodshed or teargas in the streets.
Why the hell not? I am only asking.