Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for July, 2008
World Youth Day. Gomorrah Redeemed.
23 July 2008
I flew to Sydney (offsetting my carbon emissions of course!) just in time to run into the hordes of young Catholics parading through the city’s streets on the eve of Saturday’s big Randwick love-in.
I grew up in Sydney, and I always found it a disconcerting place. To me it’s always been a city of disconnectedness and some tension. High housing prices, narrow roads and a huge population makes a cocktail that is not the best for goodwill. It’s a city where on any night you can walk into big groups of drunks staggering around the streets being all jolly and exuberant.
Well, on Friday it was a case of even bigger groups of Christians staggering around the streets being all jolly and exuberant.
In their uniforms of bright clothes, backpacks and national flags, the WYD pilgrims were obvious. although it has to be said that there were very few other people on the streets. Sydneysiders were warned to get outta town for the weekend, and to my eye, they did. Traffic was light, trains were largely empty in off-peak times. It was a Sydney as never seen before, crazy on the surface. Dead quiet underground.
Ah, but the exuberance was somethign to behold, and the locals got in on the act too. I was behind a car coming up to a pedestrian crossing. The car slammed on the brakes to let some pilgrims cross. The pilgrims were about ten metres away from the crossing, but the driver wanted to be generous and sharing with them. He got the spirit, so hhe held up the poor drivers behind him with his generosity. But what they hey, this is what a week of spiritual connectedness is all about.
Sydney can be a real Gomorrah at times, but like the Olympics, WYD brought some real, bona-fide joy to the place.
And that can never be bad.
– Phil
Peter Singer. Animal Lib’s Founder
18 July 2008
Some years ago I studied pharmacy. I only did it because my mum told me as a toddler that I wanted to be a doctor, but lacking the requisite intelligence and studying ability I wasn’t able to get in to medicine. Hence, I took the closest thing and accepted an offer for pharmacy at Sydney Uni.
The reason I mention this is that one of our first lectures involved studying the ethics of medicine. We talked about things like quantity of life versus quality of life. If someone is seriously and painfully ill with no hope of recovery, should that person’s life be maintained no matter what? I know it’s a contentious issue. There are many religions around the world that say that life is prima, and to switch off life support is the same as murder, Euthanasia, they say, is abhorrent.
The book we studied in this debate was written by an ethicist, Peter Singer. In the book he argued that life should have a quality to it. To maintain life in all circumstances, does no favour to the ill person. Sometimes, he says, it’s better to just let the person go.
To a naive 19 year old, these views were astounding. Never before had I considered that you could just let someone go, that switching off life support could actually be a kinder thing.
Peter Singer has never been afraid to speak out on anything. He founded Animal Liberation, the organisation that seeks respect for animals. Because animals can’t speak, he says, doesn’t mean that they have no value. We share about 99 percent of our DNA with rats, and even more with our fellow placental mammals, dogs.
Even so, when we went into the physiology lab in that pharmacy course to dissect living dogs, there was only one student who questioned the ethics of the dissection. “But the animal is anaesthetised” the lecturers hit back, suggesting it was fine to chop up a living animal to show us something that we could just as easily see in a video.
Even my girlfriend at the time thought the dissections were fine. She thinks differently now, she has since campaigned for animal rights and gone vegetarian. I should mention that such dissections have been long scrapped.
But it goes to show how the mindsets of people can change drastically over time.
Peter Singer is one of the people who whacked us all on the side of the head by simply raising the notion that animals have feeling too. Peter will be on the Breakfast Club later today. It’s been a couple of decades since I read his book, but it’s stayed with me in my mind, and I can still feel the whack.
– Phil
Saving the World Ain’t Easy
17 July 2008
So the Australian government has finally come out with its climate chanbge strategy. Yesterday I previewed what was going to be in it. Today we get the reaction.
The reaction is inevitable.
People crying poor about how much extra this is going to cost them.
Or are they?
It is the MEDIA that is saying people are crying poor.
True, the carbon offset plan will add about $A2000 to a typical family’s yearly bill, and this is going to be a big squeeze for mums and dads.
But only two weeks ago there was a survey of Australian people in which they said they would be happy to pay for climate-saving initiatives. If you believe the media, they feel this way no longer. I tend to think this is a case of the media trying to keep ahead of the game. They are all trying to be the battler’s friend. Maybe they don’t quite get that people are educated about climate change, and they know that their kids are going to suffer if we don’t fix this problem.
Two thousand smackers a year is not a huge cost to drastically reduce climate change in a country that is the world’s biggest emitter (on a per person basis). And aim is to get people to use less greenhouse gas-emitting power. The two grand is assuming that people will continue to use the same amount of power. It’s a fair assumption that they will use less, especially now there’s a financial incentive.
the government has taken the tough-love route. Let’s hope it works.
– Phil
Kevin Rudd Feels The Love
16 July 2008
As I mentioned yesterday, Sydney is feeling the love big time. Tens of thousands of Christians are in town for World Youth Day, among them Pope Benedict XVI who is right now finishing up his retreat in western Sydney and preparing to face the faithful tomorrow.
The WYD festivities officially started late yesterday, and the joy has been something to behold. Smiles everywhere. Good wishes and blessing abounding. Sydneysiders have never seen anything like it. Not even the 2000 Olympics came close. The last big event in the harbour city was the APEC conference last year, and there wasn’t a lot of joy about that, just road closures and lots of men in black suits with earlpieces and other types of pieces in holsters, carefully hidden from view.
All this WYD happiness must have hit home to the prime minister Kevin Rudd, because he has shown an extraordinary bit of generosity. In these times of climate change and threat to millions of people and animals, he is about to announce today his big plan for fighting the problem. Chief in the plan is an emisssions trading scheme (which effectively means that if you are going to doing something that emits greenhouse gases, then you are going to be taxed for doing it. The taxes will go to planting trees and doing other offset things).
This trading scheme will add 6 cents to every litre of petrol. That is going to be painful, especially with the price of petrol going up and up as it is.
So Kevin Rudd got the World Youth Day spirit. He is offsetting the trading scheme petrol rises by reducing other taxes on petrol. Effectively, drivers will pay no more, but heaps of dosh will go towards helping the effects caused by the petrol they burn. This means the government has pledged billions of its own dollars to climate change. No user pays here. This is Kevin Rudd pays.
Some of the newspapers suggest that this move will encourage drivers to burn petrol.
I doubt it. Petrol is still tipped to reach $2.50 a litre here in Australia within a few years. There’s already plenty of discouragement against driving with prices as they are. The last thing we need to do is to hurt people who are already hurting. And I say this as a confirmed cyclist who has given up his car.
Climate Change is coming, but it’s going to have a fight on its hands.
– Phil
World Youth Day. The Olympics of Religion.
15 July 2008
You don’t have to be Catholic to know that Sydney has been filled with the fervour of youth for World Youth Day (WYD). So feverish is the excitement that the day goes for a week!
Catholic youth from all over the world, and even the not-so-youthful, like Pope Benedict XVI is in Sydney for the day/week.
Last night the countdown clock in Sydney ticked over from “One Day To Go” to “G’Day Mate”, and the crowd went wild.
The last time I remember Sydney being feverish about anything was the Sydney Olympics in 2000. That was a time when people spoke to each other on the streets, there was a glint in the eye of anybody you met, and all the news bulletins were led by the celebrations.
The down sides are the same as for the Olympics: road closures, twee merchandise everywhere, and news bulletins lead with the celebrations.
No-one’s life is going to be saved by the WYD. No homesless person is going to get a home, no aborigine is going live a longer life. But hey, its the goodwill that matters. This week many people in Sydney will have that extra spring in their step. And that is a tangible. If we can all live a life with a bit of zing, then we are living a better life.
That’s what WYD (and the Olympics for that matter) is all about.
I’ll be in Sydney as the WYD cewlebrations climax on the weekend. I hope I’ll be able to get a seat on the train. Doubt it though.
– Phil
