Justification

It's interesting to hear Howard trying to make connections to things that just aren't there. In response to the London bombs, he tried to use them to justify his own scare campaign:

Mr Howard says it does not heighten security concerns in Australia, but people should always be alert.

"It is a direct reminder that in a society that is so similar to ours in so many ways we can't afford to be complacent," Mr Howard said.

"Measures to guard against potential terrorist threats should always be maintained and where appropriate reinforced."

Mr Howard paid tribute to the British ambulance officers who alerted police to one of the car bombs.

He says it vindicates his own Government's community awareness program on terrorism.

"There was an enormous amount of cynicism about the fridge magnets and an enormous amount of cynicism about 'be alert but not be alarmed' (slogan)," Mr Howard said.

"But what has happened here is the community ambulance officers going about their work, they have spotted this - now that sends a very strong message that these community awareness programs do work." (emphasis mine)

Firstly what the hell does a London ambulance officer have to do with our fridge magnets? How does his spotting of smoke vindicate our scare campaign?

An ambulance officer noticed the smoke: a trained emergency response specialist. Notice how Howard slips in the "community" word. He tries to make it out like the ambulance officer is some volunteer that just wandered in off the street and noticed (being prompted from a fridge magnet 16 000km away in another country, obviously) the smoke coming out of the Mercedes.

He really is clutching at straws if he thinks that he can make ridiculous arguments such as these. Honestly, is anybody really listening to his lies anymore? Or are most people just laughing at an old man who will do and say anything to stay in power?

Census Data

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released a searchable interface of the 2006 statistics.

Go here to search by location

Or here to search by topic

Let's you see what your suburb/town really consists of.

An obvious result

An obvious result of the 6 month ban on alcohol that the government is proposing is that people will simply move to where the alcohol is. You are talking about people living 15-20 to a house. It's not like they have any incentive to stay where they are. Most don't work, so if you cut off their alcohol, they'll just up and move to where they can get some, which will be the larger towns in NT.

Take the opinion of Danny Banjo, an elder from Cape York.

He thinks the Prime Minister's plan to enforce a grog ban in the Northern Territory will only do what alcohol management plans have done on Cape York – shift the problem elsewhere.

"Here it is easier to get a drink. I drink anything they make in a bottle, rum, beer, wine – you name it, I drink it.

"They are trying the grog ban up the Cape. But wherever you go along the highway you can find a pub. Many of the hard drinkers come down here and live on the river or in squats."

Danny is among the exodus of dedicated drinkers flowing out of strictly-controlled Aboriginal communities and into towns such as Mareeba, Cooktown and Cairns.

It's a naive attempt to show that they're doing something decisive, but it's misguided in the extreme.

"Stupid" isn't an adequate response

ABC News

The Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey has accused the construction union of using dirty tricks to get workers to vote against the Howard government at the next election.

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) fully admits it is trying to persuade migrant workers to become citizens so that they can vote.

Mr Hockey says the Union is trying to influence a huge number of people.

In other breaking news, it appears Australia has a functioning democracy where citizens may cast a secret ballot for whomever they wish. It also appears that the government may be trying to run some sort of legal, parallel "election" campaign where they are trying to influence citizens to vote for them.

Will post details as they come to hand on these amazing developments.

Aboriginals and John Howard's electioneering

The announcement by the federal government to take over Aboriginal settlements rife with child abuse and impose draconian measures on them has been swallowed by the Main Stream Media as a Good Thing ™. None of them are applying any commonsense tests to the announced legislation. Do we want to stop the abuse of children? Of course. But is this the way to go about it? I seriously doubt it. For a very good summary of the major issues with this plan, you would do well to read this piece at Club Troppo.

But there is no sign of any of those careful, considered elements in the “plan” John Howard announced today. Like Howard’s $10 billion water “plan”, it appears to have been hastily cobbled together on the back of an envelope aiming solely at electoral advantage by playing to the “Howard battlers” and wedging the ALP. It appears to be little more than a cynical, desperate, Textor focus group-driven grab for redneck votes, by targetting the poorest , most vulnerable Australians. Sadly it may well work, judging by the supine response of Kevin Rudd and other Labor leaders to date.

...

What effect will banning alcohol from all remote remote Aboriginal communities have? I can tell you immediately, from 24 years living in the NT. All the drinkers would immediately move into town in Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine and Tennant Creek, where there is no way they could be stopped from drinking without restriction. The electoral effects of this urban social chaos would certainly be fatal for Dave Tollner, the incumbent CLP federal member for the Darwin-based marginal seat of Solomon. At least some Liberal advisers (notably Territory born and bred senior Howard adviser and policeman’s son Mark Textor) would be well aware of the practical effects of such a policy, which is why you can guarantee it won’t actually be introduced before the election and will be quietly shelved thereafter whoever wins.

Informed researchers in this area know that Howard's electioneering approach is flawed.

The author of three reports on child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities says the Government's new plan to tackle the problem will lead to increased violence and suicide.

Professor Judy Atkinson from Southern Cross University says she was stunned to hear of plans to freeze welfare payments and ban pornography and alcohol from Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

She says the Government has not thought through the consequences of its strategy to only target Indigenous communities.

"Some of the things that I know will happen in response to this- we will have an increase of violence, we will have an increase of suicide and suicide attempts," she said.

"There will be greater feelings of despair and we can't do it ourselves in our communities."

Where exactly are they going to get these magical doctors to do all the checks of the community? There is a shortage of doctors Australia wide. And what about the bureaucratic nightmare of trying to adminster all these checks in remote communities. It would be hard enough in a major city, let alone many settlements flung all over the Territory.

Howard is using this issue to gain votes by painting all indigenous Australians with the same brush. In the the same way that all boat people throw their children overboard and they're all terrorists trying to get into Australia and "jump the queue", any Aboriginies that care for their kids are going to be swept up in this indiscriminate net. "But if they are looking after their kids, they have nothing to worry about", you may say. How would you feel if you had to continually take your child to some doctor all the time, just to justify that you've been a good parent? As a new father, I would be highly offended.

And why did the Howard government wait 11 years to decide that this was an National Emergency? It's not like alcohol abuse in Indigenous communities is something new.

If they are going to go with all the itmes they are promising, then they should impose it on the whole of Australia. A 6 month alcohol ban would be a Good Thing ™. The road toll would certainly fall considerably, as would alcohol fuelled violence. For example from this study:

FINDINGS: Multiple regression analyses revealed a significant relationship between overall alcohol sales in an area and its incidence of assault for both Sydney and country NSW. There were few effects of outlet or alcohol type for Sydney, but the effect of alcohol sales from hotels and off-licences accounted for most of the alcohol-assault relationship for country NSW.

and the Western Australia "Enough is Enough" campaign.

Research has conclusively shown that hazardous and harmful alcohol use in Australia results in high economic and social costs to the community.

* Between 1991/92 and 2000/01, Western Australia was the only state to indicate an overall increase in adult per capita alcohol consumption.²
* In 2000/01 WA adults (every person over 15 years-of-age) consumed an average of 11.12 litres of alcohol, second only to the Northern Terriority.²
* Non-metropolitan areas of Australia have higher relative rates of hospitalisation for injuries and disease caused by risky and high-risk drinking, than metropolitan areas.¹
* In 2001, alcohol was responsible for a total of 8,196 hospital admissions and 43, 238 bed days. The total cost of this hospitalisation was over $30 million dollars.³
* Police report that up to 80 per cent of their work, including drink driving, property crime, assaults and domestic violence, is alcohol and drug-related.²
* The number of alcohol-related assaults in Western Australia increased by 52 per cent over the 7 years from 1991/92 to 1997/98.³
* Along with economic costs, the personal impact that excessive alcohol use has within the community is also significant. For example, the number of alcohol-related assaults markedly increased by 52.1% between 1990/91 to 1998/99, from 7,684, to 11,688.4

If you watch A Current Affair or Today Tonight, then it would seem that there is an epidemic of sexual predators, violence, pornography etc. Well that's the impression the shows give, anyway and they wouldn't exaggerate now, would they? All the issues that Howard is worried about, so let's apply these laws equally to all Australians. If the argument is that not even one sexual abuse should be tolerated (which no-one is disagreeing with) then place the same restrictions on the rest of Australia. Sure some law abiding people will be inconvenienced, but it's for the children, people. And no minority is too small to be a vote winner, no matter how ridiculous the proposal.

But don't take my rambling rant for it. Go read Ken Parish's essay.

ABC News

ABC News has gone all Web 2.0. All the requisite features are there, AJAX, tagging, user managed content, uploading content.

It's also got a lot of the list of visual elements:

* Rounded Shapes
* Shades
* Sans Serif
* Pastell v2.0
* Footers
* Buttons
* Font-Size: Oversized
* Descriptive HTML (XML style)

I think it's great. It shows that ABC is aware of what's happening online and is is willing to make the necessary changes to stay in touch.

The thing I'm most impressed with is they finally have put a proper search box on the site, rather than what looks like a box, but is really a button that goes to another page... That annoying box is still there at the top of the page, but the new search box further down, where it's more obvious.

Well done ABC.

Iraq, Marines and all that jazz

Over the weekend Judy's cousin Harland who is a Marine stayed with us, as he and his ship are involved in Exercise Talisman Sabre.

It was interesting to chat with him as he had done a tour of Iraq. It was a fairly eventful tour as he'd been blown up by IED's a couple of times. Not exactly a walk in the park. We discussed the war and various issues (which I'm not going to elaborate on) and it was extremely interesting to have the opinion of someone who was there "on the ground".

It was great for Jude to see some of her family as they are all back in the states, bar her mum. Hopefully he can come back in October and have a better look around.

Beware the smiling assassin

Sure, he may look cute, but beware.

This is what he can do to you:



Gabriel was playing with a USB cable while I was sitting next to him. He decided to start swinging it around and managed to hit me directly in the eyeball. It really hurt at the time and it felt like I had grit in my eye. Judy had a look at it for me and you could see that my cornea had been cut right across the pupil. A quick look on the net confirmed I had a corneal abrasion, so it was off to the medical centre for me.

I managed to survive 6hrs on the bike, but I can't survive a 7 month old.

The doctor put something on it which made it go numb, to get rid of that sandy feeling, and then some antiseptic so make sure it didn't get infected. On went the eye patch which I had to wear for the next day.

It's amazing how much you rely on your sight. I couldn't goto work, as I could hardly hit the keys with any accuracy and my good eye became so sore from working overtime. Also, when the good eye would move, obviously the bad eye would move as well, scraping the inside of my eyelid.

By the next day, it had seemingly mostly healed, and you couldn't even see the scar on the pupil.

Moral of the story: beware of babies wielding USB cables.

Kooralbyn Boonah Marathon

The weekend saw me complete the Kooralbyn-Boonah MTB marathon. This is an 85km loop from Kooralbyn resort to Boonah and back again. It comes in 3 flavours: the 30km Kooralbyn to Boonah, the 65km Lite loop and the 85km full marathon. Naturally, lacking of any brains, I entered the full marathon.

I have previously competed in 12 and 24hr races in a team of 2, but you don't ride for more than about 2hrs before you have a break at those events. This time I was keen to see how I would go at something really long and continuous.

My lead up training hadn't been stellar. I had been doing my usual riding to work (about an hour a day) as well as the one weekend ride for about 2hrs. The weekend before the race I rode up Nebo and back again, just to make sure I had some sort of major hill training to speak of. What I was hoping would pull me through is having done rogaining, as well as the other 12/24hr races, I have a pretty good mental attitude to this long distance stuff. I have done 15hr rogaines, which set me up mentally to know how to pace myself and to push on when needed. Also, the rogaining has taught me when my body is likely to cramp and I have developed my own systems to try to prevent cramps occurring in the first place. Most importantly for me, I wasn't there to race, I was there to finish it at my own pace and not to wipe myself out doing it.

Enough of the prelude, onto the race.

It was an early start that saw us on the road to Kooralbyn (we almost didn't make it as I hit the "off" button of my alarm, rather than "snooze" but that's another story). We arrived in reasonable time and I registered and collected my entry pack.

The weather looked fine and the Bureau predicted "showers late" so I thought I would be fine with my inital tyre selection of ADvantage on the front and Larsen TT's on the back (if the weather was looking more wet, I was going to go ADvantage front and back).

Lining up on at the start, it was a strange mix of bikes. There were the obligatory dually's of course, including my new Giant Trance 1.


The hardcore and the not so hardcore were on hardtails of every description, including one guy on a road bike and one on a hybrid that looked like it had seen its best day 20 years ago.

So 08:10 and we're off. 5 min later, we hit a slippery mound that no-one seems keen to ride and we're already pushing our bikes. Not really what I imagined. It seemed to be on and off again for a while as we had a number of traffic jams on hills as the throng of riders tried to get around each other. Eventually things started to spread out and we started doing more riding on the hills. Here is a profile of the course, for those following along.



The ride through "The Udders" was fairly pleasant track through farmland. It went onto gravel roads and across fields and was not too taxing. We arrived at the "Grassy Knoll" which I insisted on riding (if I'm getting my places right). I got over the top and realised why everyone else was walking, as we were coming up on the Marbles. Here's what it looked like when we got there.



This was actually the easier of the two climbs. There seemed to be a hell of a lot of walking going on in this race, not what I expected.



On we rolled to "Breathless". This area was particularly scenic, so I stopped for a few pics.



And of course there was a climb involved.



I walked part of this hill as well, along with a heap of other people. This was starting to become a recurring theme. One thing I did know, all this steep walking was making my calves hurt and that was a sure fire way of getting a cramp.

Once over this, the run down Kamakazi was intense. According to both my bike computers, I hit over 70km/hr on what was a gravel road. It was a nice (if not a bit crazy) way of heading into Boonah.

I met up with Judy, Gabriel and Cheryl at the Boonah checkpoint. I was there about 10 min, having a stretch, something to eat and getting my sunglasses cleaned up.

The ride through "No man's land" was exactly that: unremarkable riding on bitumen/gravel. The hills seemed to come and go, and I ended up riding with three other people who were about my speed. We seemed to stay together until the top of the first "Sugarloaf" where they stopped for a rest. I was intent on carrying on, so I left them to their devices. At this point I was alone, and would stay that way till I hit "The Wall". This suited me fine, as I was enjoying the scenery and liked riding with no distractions.

Up and over the second Sugarloaf, and it was into "Free Fall". This was a steep bitumen road, but interestingly enough, I didn't end reaching my previous speed of 70+km/hr.

Then came The Wall.

Everyone talks about this. The description of the ride mentions it specifically, so I was expecting a hell of a wall. Also the fact that it comes after 50km of riding, makes it even more demanding. To ward off cramps I had been stretching my calves and hamstrings on every single downhill stretch I could, mostly to save myself for this part of the race.

You hit the wall at a RH turn, and face what appears to be a short hill, all bitumen. It's fairly steep and I'm in the lowest gear, but it was easily manageable. Once on top, this is what greeted me.



I thought, "That was relatively easy", and I appeared to be halfway up, according to the profile map (which I had laminated and kept in my pocket). Not having read it properly, I didn't realise that it was only the small bump right down the bottom of the profile. In reality, I was probably only 1/8th of the way up. As it turns out, I was better off being oblivious to this fact.

After the run down that bit of a dip it was back to climbing. Back into the lowest gear and head down into a rhythm. The hill contained a number of bends, each one hiding the next section of climbing. I saw people walking in front of me, but as a point of fact, I hate walking up hills and find it much easier to ride, so I used that inherent dislike to keep going.

Every so often I would look up and the top just seemed too far away, so I looked down and fortunately the visor on my helmet stopped me from looking up unless I lifted my entire head up. I just focused on the few metres of bitumen in front of me and just kept my legs spinning in a constant rhythm.

Slowly I started passing all the walkers, which was motivating, and most of them gave encouragement as you went past (albeit very slowly). Round one corner, the Race Elements guys had painted slogans (and advertising for themselves), a'la the Alpe d'Huez. There was also one of them there cheering you on, which was pretty cool.

Eventually I hit the turnoff for Green Hills Rd, thinking the worst was behind me. I felt reasonable at that point and continued on. It turned out that this next bit was the real killer, and it wasn't specifically Green Hills Rd, but the small hills up to Everest that nearly stopped me. I perservered however, and made it all the way before stopping for a minute to get some water from the checkpoint on the last peak of Everest at the top of The Slide.

The run down The Slide was another fast one on gravel. This led into the Marbles in reverse, which were just as scary looking when going down them, but I rode them all the way down.

Back onto the Udders, I was feeling quite good. I could feel the tell-tale twangs of cramps starting to come, but I kept stretching on the bike and adjusting my riding position to keep them at bay.

Since The Wall, I had started to pass people, which for me was quite novel, as usually I'm the one being passed. Most of these people were walking up The Wall and associated hills, and a lot of them were in obvious discomfort from cramps and associated injuries. My strategy of managing my body was seeming to pay off. I ended up passing around 30 people before I finished.

The last part of the ride was back on the single track of the Kooralbyn 24hr course. I was feeling really good at this point and thought if I got a cramp, I only had a couple of km to limp home so I went for it. I ended up racing another guy home who had caught me on the single track and I gave it everything. I only had the slight twangs of cramp and beat him at the end by a good margin.

My final time was 5hrs and 54min. Before I started the race I looked at last years results and arbitrarily set myself the goal of finishing in under 6hrs, so I was pretty happy.

What were my overall impression of the race? Well for a start, it's not a race for purists. There is scant single track, with most of the riding done on bitumen, gravel roads or fire trails. Also, all the walking that may be necessary would also spoil it for some people (however if your skill level was higher and you were out in front, it probably wasn't necessary to walk a lot of these hills). The course suited me, as I am decent at just grinding along on roads where very little skill is necessary. Personally I really enjoyed it. I managed to push just hard enough to keep my pace at a reasonable level whilst keeping the cramps away. I'm sure the new dual suspension really helped in this regard as the reduction in jarring of muscles would have reduced the stress on my muscles and thus the likelihood of cramping. I rode completely alone for large sections of the race which I really enjoyed. The scenery was on the ride was fantastic, and because it is open country, you can see it and appreciate it.

I would certainly do it again, perhaps with a little more training. Maybe next year I'll try for 5 hours...