Nothing much changes in many aspects of the news cycle these days. Take the last fortnight for example. Yet another gruesome domestic violence murder in Sydney with two sons traumatised beyond belief. Neighbours said the victim had suffered "decades of violence" with screams heard regularly and the police called. Same old story. As the column remarked only last week Rosie Batty, Ken Lay and their teams - all of us for that matter - still have a long way to go to resolve this issue.
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Domestic violence, along with the Ice Epidemic, remains the nation's greatest problem, so the experts tells us.
Further down the ugly scale come sportsmen, principally footballers, role models (don't you hate that description?) like Mitchell Pearce, leading the pack.
There are, however, different ways of looking at the tsunami of sportsmen hitting the headlines for more than their ability to play consistently well.
In his column, Saturday Serve, in The Canberra Times, journalist David Polkinghorne wrote: "When the Pearce video is stacked alongside a topic such as paedophile priests it just doesn't seem worthy of my condemnation. The main thing I saw was someone struggling to deal with the demon drink".
Another journalist, Stan Grant, probably got closest to the issue when he said on ABC's Q&A this week, "(they) are playing a sport that is funded by alcohol and alcohol advertisements and gambling and gambling advertisements, then they are vilified for acting out the very thing their sport is funded in; it is an incredible hypocrisy".
Years ago this column suggested governments should tax company sponsorship, especially alcohol and betting companies. There is not much point in raising excise charges or taxing the customers more when it is the companies supplying these things that escape but a meagre or nil company tax. "Alcohol and gambling are a destructive partnership," one of the Q&A panel said.
We got rid of tobacco advertising; when do we eliminate the other two?
Another problem that keeps bobbing up, gets discussed by the media, politicians and producers but dies without resolution by governments each time is water, or the lack of it. So it was again on Tuesday in a DA story, last paragraph in a very positive report about the Riverina food bowl being in a prize position to capitalise on the "dining boom". Great, but as Griffith branch president of NSW Farmers, Helen Dalton, said, while the Riverina was blessed with perfect soils, no disease and the "world's best sun", it suffered from "crippling" water legislation.
A neighbour, who drew Dalton's comment to my attention said, "this water legislation and the lack of more dams and reservoirs, has been going on for ages; what are our politicians doing about it, when will they embrace it for the nation's benefit and fix the bleeding obvious".
The short answer is, when voters realise the major parties in this nation no longer meet the pioneering and development criteria and elect ones that will.
Finally, the most deserved award on Australia Day was posthumously awarded to John Brasier as the newest inductee to the city's Walk of Honour.
His recognition was long overdue. A schoolteacher of traditional ilk, a sportsman of wide-ranging ability and administrative capacity; a man never too busy, whatever the circumstances, to help his fellow citizens.
He never sought praise, recognition or honours but this one was due.
