In three days, it will be exactly a year since the first case of coronavirus was reported in Australia. A man returning from Wuhan, China was diagnosed in Victoria on January 25. It was not until March 20 and 21 that first our borders were closed to all non-residents; the next day, social distancing rules were imposed.
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Much has happened since then. A somewhat distraught FOMM contact advised "our lives will never be the same again". A reader added "we live in mad times", but the more perceptive suggested living in New Zealand or Australia were the places to be.
Actually, scouring my delayed reading of newspapers, magazines and journals over recent weeks has led me to the conclusion that the pandemic year has brought with it some excellent contributions from those publications.
Not the least of which was this one, "This year was not all bad", written on December 29 last in The Sydney Morning Herald by Sam Roggeveen, director of the Lowy Institute's international security program.
Roggeveen gave us this to think about: "If you want to worry about democracy, worry more about the hollowness at the centre of the political process, not about headline-grabbing extremists."
More from Roggeveen later, but two weeks after his article Sean Kelly, former media adviser to Labor PMs Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, wrote: "Our politics is becoming vulnerable to a loose alliance of fantasists, racists and politicians willing to disregard convention."
We are in desperate need of more humane and compassionate attitudes from our politicians.
Kelly wrote: "More attention will have to be given to the interactions between social media, racism and politics. It will mean accurately describing not what politicians say they are doing, but what they are actually doing - with particular attention given to actions that undermine our democratic institutions." Kelly's assessment is why FOMM is adamant that Australian voters and, particularly journalists, who promote political parties to blithely "carry on as though nothing at all has changed" can be, as Roggerveen inferred, a serious miscalculation, leading to conflict.
Roggeveen wrote: "Politics has become highly professionalised, cut off from ordinary citizens who see it not as something to participate in but as something to either ignore or watch like it is a professional sport." FOMM would add to this the do-nothing attitude of many major party politicians merely keeping a seat warm for someone of similar (or poorer) standard. It is becoming increasingly clear, too, that we are in desperate need of more humane and compassionate attitudes from our politicians.
Wagga reader John Kjeldsen got this aspect in perspective in his short but precise appeal via our letters page on December 23. Writing to the PM about the appalling treatment of the migrant family from Biloela, a hard-working family with the children escorted to school on their Christmas Island detention camp by armed guards.
Kjeldsen emphasised the point that real criminals can be allowed to stay while the Morrison government "relentlessly persecutes the kind of migrants we should welcome with open arms".
Our independents, the federal MPs Helen Haines, Zali Steggell and Andrew Wilkie - not to mention the increasing numbers in state houses like Joe McGirr in Wagga and, also more emerging from some of the minor parties like the SFF - are an example to voters that they can contribute, there is a path for them to table their thoughts and theories for a better, more moral Australia.
Finally, water and yet another example, if ever any more warnings were needed, furore surrounds the appointment, and the formalisation of that appointment, by the federal government's Resources Minister Keith Pitt, of ex-NSW Deputy Premier Troy Grant to replace Mick Keelty as inspector-general of water compliance.
In The Barrier Truth on December 30, Barwon MP Roy Butler reckons it is another move by the Nationals to stave off a Royal Commission into all aspects of water management in NSW; for all of Australia for that matter. This is another "jobs for the Nats' boys" appointment, according to Nature Conservation Council chief Chris Gambian, and has dashed the hopes of farmers and irrigators in the industry that some confidence in the governance of our precious inland water supplies would be restored.
Gambian wrote: "This hyper-partisan appointment confirms the worst fears of many that water policy in NSW (and nationally) is still captured by the industry and their political mates." That's party politics, today - Australian style.
