I was once a chef…

The Moulin Rouge, apart from being a nightclub in France, and a film, is also a dish that I created, which was inspired by watching the movie. I wanted to create something really tasty, a kind of symphony for the taste buds.

Moulin Rouge is a movie that appeals to our senses: beautiful music; wonderful dresses and costumes; wonderful songs; and deep emotions and feeling. It is a wonderful experience to watch such a movie, thanks to the genius of the director  Buz Luhrmann.

Ingredients:

One small cabbage, one medium carrot, one red onion, a clove of good garlic, one lime,  half a cup of sultanas, two strips of rind-less bacon, two very ripe tomatoes, half a cup of light olive oil, pepper and salt.

Begin by cutting the cabbage in half. You now need to cut it longwise, not against the grain, so as to achieve thin strips of cabbage much like spaghetti. To make it easier to cut, you can cut the cabbage in four pieces. Once you have finished cutting, it should look something like this:

Now you need to prepare the other ingredients, but while you do this start steaming the cabbage. For this you need a steamer or a steaming pot. Ensure you have enough water in the bottom part of the pot and put the cabbage on the top half of the pot covering with the lid. While the cabbage cooks proceed with the rest.

Now we need to cut in strips (or julienne) one carrot; then we need to peel the tomatoes ensuring to scoop out and discard the seeds. To peal the tomatoes we need to put them in hot water for less than a minute. Get them out of the hot water and the skin will peel off easy. Cut them in half and gently take the seeds out. Now you can cut the tomatoes into small pieces. We need to cut one red onion and some think strips of bacon. It is important not to have big pieces because how we cut our vegetables and meat will affect the final taste of the dish. Once you cut everything, it should look something like this:

Now we need to fry the onions and the garlic in some olive oil just like this:

Now we add the bacon, the carrots, the sultanas and we keep frying making sure not to burn anything.

Finally we add the tomatoes, squeeze the lime juice and add salt and pepper to taste. It should look something like this:

Now we need to dress our cabbage. The cabbage should be cocked in about 20 minutes ensuring that the pot does not run out of water.

Once the cabbage is cooked we place it in a large dish and we need to dress it with some light olive oil, some good quality white vinegar and a squeeze of lime. Add some salt and mix. Now we can put on the top the rest of the vegetables and bacon. It should look something like this:

Now we need a full size medium roasted chicken. You can bake your own or buy one from the supermarket already cooked; but when you get home you need to put the bought chicken in an oven at medium to high temperature (180C) for about 15 to 20 minutes to ensure that the skin becomes crispy again.

Meanwhile, you need to prepare the black-current sauce and the ingredients for this sauce are six tablespoon of black-current jam or half a jar of jam; one tablespoon of white vinegar; 1 cups of chicken stock liquid; and finally some mild chilly sauce, about one tablespoon. Mix these ingredients well and gently warm the sauce on the fire until it is nice and hot and it should have some consistency. For this use your common sense because measurements depends from the size of the cup and your utensils.

Cut the chicken in pieces, top with the black-current sauce and serve with the cabbage. A nice red wine goes extremely well with it and, of course, some garlic bread.

Buon Appetito

That we tolerate the mental illness of celebrities does not equate with our tolerance of the average Joe who may suffer with depression or bipolar. Let’s not fool ourselves because if Jim Carrey or Catherine Zeta Jones come out and tell us about their mental disorder that is not going to help me or a poor other sufferer who remains alienated and at the mercy of stigma.  So what would it take to change things?

I feel that we need to give a voice to sufferers who are most exposed to stigma and we need to include these sufferers into the research rather than have a few experts, who probably have no idea of what it is like to suffer with depression, dictate their ideas. To be perfectly honest, to this day, we know very little about mental illness. Why? We keep treating sufferers as if they were disease cases, unable to think or reason for themselves and make decisions, rather than people who suffer with a disability. We resort to medication that, in most cases, and in the long run, does more harm than good because without social support all else will always fail.

We keep throwing large sums of money at the problem of mental illness. Billions are spent each year in creating websites, writing books and various literature, on research that is mostly useless and is only of benefit to academics in financial terms. We have people who are decorated with gold medals, because of their achievements in the area of mental illness. Yet we have little or no clue as to what is needed to reduce mental illness. Let me spell what is really needed: to educate sufferers and this means dragging them in schools and Universities; and learn from their direct experiences; and for professionals to come off their horses, to begin to contemplate on the possibility that people need much more than medication to help themselves and to be helped: they need to be included as equal human beings not be feared.

Unfortunately, mental illness is a lucrative business and many people profit, in financial terms, on the misfortunes of others who may suffer with a mental illness. We need to take a good look at ourselves, particularly academics, for if we look hard enough we find that we all prejudiced and all barking at the wrong tree. When are things going to change?

The whole social approach to reducing mental illness is wrong.  We need to reduce STIGMA as a matter of urgency, because failure to do so will cost a tremendous amount of money  and it will only help increase the number of sufferers in the world.

Usually, when something does not work we change tactics. Not in the case of mental illness perhaps because so many people profit from it at the expense of sufferers. Many may now be tempted to say that there are academics and experts who also suffer with a mental illness. Yes, but they are no longer at the mercy of stigma, at least not to the extent that an alienated sufferer is particularly if a disadvantaged person, in social economic terms that is.  Academics with a mental illness are usually able to function well especially because they have been accepted by the system and are now part of the problem. But the fact remain that these few fortunate people in influential places, with mental illness, are used by the system to give an impression that those with mental illness are included in the social structure. Let’s not be fooled for a minute. This is a myth. The majority of people with mental illness remain excluded and feel alienated and this is the reality. They are often equated to irresponsible people, who cannot make sensible decisions and who need to be kept on a disability pension.

For as long as we have stigma, to the extent that it exists in our world today, and may I add that it continues to worsen each year, sufferers will be unable to cope left at the mercy of a system that treats them as guinea pigs so that corporations and mental health experts can continue to profit. Is this what we really want? I surely hope not. The reality is that people with a mental illness are often highly intelligent much more so than we can imagine and that many people with mental illness can be found amongst scientists, artists, writers and leaders. This has never helped reduce stigma and I guess that even celebrities who come out disclosing their mental illness won’t be able to help much. We are up against an ideology that produces mental illness and is used to profit in financial terms. Such a lucrative business is important to those who have interests in it.

Mental illness has three dimensions as I keep repeating: the biological dimension; the social or cultural; and the psychological dimension.  We have made some progress in the biological dimension but are going backwards in social and psychological terms.

Alfredo Zotti

This is the drawing of my wife’s grandmother Carol . I made this quite a few years ago and when I showed to a friend, who is a general practitioner and an academic in America, she wrote the following poem, inspired by this drawing:

My Mind

My mind can crawl faster than light and race so slowly, I have time to observe each thought in all its delicate detail before it speeds by, chased by another slow string of notes yet the observation changes the music, disharmony results, such discordance is painful.

The absence of thought can reassure at times, yet the void can open too wide and the notes drop in, one by one, lost in all their resonance, concordant or not. How to walk the line between the worlds, war of the worlds, a world so beautiful and stark and bleak there is no where to run but in, some force chasing me, pulling me slyly in, which direction I cannot tell until I am there, then it is too late to play the notes.

Shamans and the community spirit

I am fortunate to know two outstanding Shamans: Valda Wojcrow, who was born in Siberia and migrated to Australia; and Kalderini, an American Indian. These modern Shamans do not charge money for their services. They do it for love and because, in their own words, they were born to be Shamans. The fascinating thing is that Kalderini is a Catholic priest and a Shaman at the same time and according to him the two work well together. Shamans are not all the same. There are many varieties like Classical Shamanism and Core Shamanism. In addition, there are many dishonest Shamans and those who claim to be Shamans but are not. It is extremely complex to define Shamanism today. For these reasons I have decided to get to know two Shamans and let them speak about their unique experiences.

Valda has given me permission to write about her views and perspectives, while I am still waiting for Kalderini’s permission.

According to Valda, we have to understand mental illness as a three dimensional concept (let’s picture a triangle in our minds): the biological dimension; the social/cultural dimension; and the psychological dimension. In the Western world, we are doing OK (but not spectacularly) in the biological department;  unfortunately, we are not doing so well in the social/cultural and psychological dimensions. A good Shaman considers the three dimensions and works tirelessly to attend to these three dimensions equally, so that some harmony can be restored in the sufferers.

Whether we know it or not, our Western world is sick. We have some technology but what good is this technology, really speaking? Yes many of us have computers, mobile phones, cars and all of the luxuries, but these are not always used to advance our spiritual knowledge. In fact, much of this technology can be harmful to our younger generation stuck in front of a screen playing games and engaging in small and often useless talk that leads to problems. When we really think about it, our technology comes at a great cost; tremendous impact on the environment and on our spirit.

Sufferers do watch the news, keep in touch with what is happening in the world and this, for people who suffer with bipolar or depression is a heavy load to carry, particularly for those of us who are intellectuals. Stephen Fry writes: “Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.”

To put it simply, take away our technology, we are really like Neanderthals dressed in modern clothes. I say Neanderthals because what distinguished Neanderthals from Homo Sapiens, in the past, was Homo Sapiens’ ability to create and live in communities while Neanderthals were loners which brought their demise. The community spirit and ability to work in groups is what saved Homo Sapiens from extinction. Spiritually, many of us are bankrupt and in order to live in the Western world today, one needs to be a little insane to cope. How can we recover from mental illness under these circumstances?

We live in a world where there are many overwhelming problems created by greed, ignorance and lack of wisdom. We can medicate the biological dimension of mental illness but we are unable to attend to the social and psychological aspects of it. Hard to get better when our humanness is being extracted from us.

I will write more about Valda but for now her advice is that we need to attend to the three dimensions of mental illness. Is this possible in our society? For Vlada it is possible if we engage in a constructive debate about these problems and work towards a better future. Vision can help us, even if we cannot yet achieve this vision. But it is important to recognize this vision and hold it close to our hearts. Our priorities are wrong. We need to rediscover the community spirit which we have lost and learn how to live together, to be tolerant of each other, to be compassionate and develop empathy. The road that we have taken is a road that leads to extinction of the human environment.

To reduce mental illness and help sufferers, according to Valda, we need to reduce Stigma. Stigma has to do with both the social/cultural and psychological aspects of mental illness. Stigma is the most damaging force that needs to be eradicated. We can medicate people as much as we want but if we don’t get rid of stigma we will loose the battle against mental illness. It will keep on increasing yearly to the point that it will become the number one burden of disease.

Stigma makes people feel as if they don’t belong to the social world, disconnected from their people and themselves, almost as if enclosed in a vacuum. Alienation is a great contributor to mental illness. Our number one priority is to reduce stigma. How can we do this when stigma is increasing? That is the question, but we must not loose heart. We must work on our vision for where there is a will there is a way. And this vision is the vision of a world where humans have come to understand that their salvation lies in their ability to create communities for the future.

According to Valda, the reason why some Shamans were so successful, in helping sufferers, was because there was no stigma in their cultures. Once you have no stigma, t sufferers have a chance to recover, to find the strength to cope. The biological aspect of mental illness will probably always be there, but the sufferer who finds him or herself in a stigma free society feels included, loved and cared for, and in this position s/he has all the will to get better. But in our society, all this support is missing and for many what is the point of getting better when we are left to deal with the stigma?

According to Valda, doctors, psychologist and mental health professionals need to focus on stigma reduction. To this day, they have failed. They need to ask themselves why? What can they do to really help? This is a question that is difficult to answer and that requires some vision and reflection.

Vision is the word that Valda kept repeating. We need vision in all senses of the word but especially a vision of community where we come to understand that we are all connected and not separate.

Alfredo Zotti

Alfredo Zotti

I started to apply for a Master candidature back in 2002. In the year 2011, nine years later, and having applied to almost all of the Australian universities, I have not been able to get a part time position in a Masters candidature. This is probably because I suffer with bipolar 2 and, back in 2001, I had to discontinue my studies due to ill health.

My undergraduate years had not been easy. English is my second language and when I went to college, at thirty-one years of age, to get my Secondary School Certificate, I only knew a few words of English. Nevertheless, I made it, I graduate with Honours (Class II, division I) and it has all been a tremendous struggle considering that I suffer with a serious mental disorder like bipolar2. Yet now I seem to have found a tremendous obstacle and it would seem that my supervisor was right, back in 2001, when he said that if I drop out of my studies I would never get back, I would never be accepted by any Universities.  I thought he was just saying that to help me stay and finish my studies. But what he said was true. I haven’t been able, to this day, to get an offer. The reasons are that there is no adequate supervisor for my studies, or that academics do not get back to me, or that my writing and research skills are not adequate.

I, on the other hand, feel that what I have to say is important and that I should have been given another chance by now. Yet, I am also aware that academics are extremely busy and that they do not have the time and resources to really help those with mental illness. The economic rationalism has left many disabled people behind and to compete with normal people. It does not seem fair to me.

In any case, I attempted again when I saw a professor’s advertisement on his website, for a positions for a PhD, fully funded, for studies on mental health stigma.  I thought that that was ideal for me since I help many sufferers online everyday and that I study stigma. My honours degree is in Social Anthropology and it may have not been adequate, but I have done some studies in psychology at University during my undergraduate years,  and I am very familiar with psychological terms and issues because of necessity. Being aware that a PhD may have been too much for me to handle, I asked the professor if he could help me get into a Masters candidature at his University.

In addition, at the same university, I sent three emails to three other professors that were involved in mental health stigma studies. I received a letter from one who told me to apply just like every other student. Of course, I had applied at the same university before, with a different topic, and I was told that there was no suitable supervisor for my studies. It was reasonable for me to presume that because I suffer with bipolar 2, I would need someone’s help to really make it through. The other two professors never replied to my emails.

That experience really upset me and unsettled me. Both my wife and I were quite taken by that kind of rejection. So I wrote to SANE Australia explaining the problems I had encountered. Nearly two months after writing to SANE,  I received a letter from one of the three professors I had contacted in relation to the stigma research.  I was told that he was prepared to meet me to discuss the topic that I had sent to him.   Of course, by now I was really fuming and I did not want to waste any more of my time nor that of anyone else. I replied to this professor stating that I felt that stigma was to be found in universities as well and I wanted to write about it. I wanted to challenge the system and not just study to go along with the Status Quo. I needed some real help to express my true concerns and argue about how stigma had affected me and many other sufferers with whom I was in email exchanges, all based on experience,  rather than on what people say or read on books without having any direct experience of what it is to suffer and be subjected to stigma.  I never heard anything after that email. The third professor never even replied to me. I cannot help but think that they just wanted to get rid of me because I was seen as a problem. It was a bad start from the beginning and nothing good could come out of that environment of mistrust. I know this from experience.

The following is a brief description of a possible direction in writing a thesis proposal that I sent to the professors:

Abstract

In the first part of this chapter, I discuss the problem of mental health stigma, particularly its unique characteristics that are intrinsically enmeshed with the Western Ideology of mental illness as biological illness.  We know that mental illness has both biological and environmental origins and that we need a holistic approach to help people cope and/or towards rehabilitation where this is possible. However, fMRI brain scans reveal that the brain is plastic and that there is always opportunity for improvement.

That mental illness is purely biological, as disease, is an idea from which many academics and mental health professionals are beginning to distance themselves. There may well be rare cases that are purely biological; but there is not enough evidence to assume that most cases of psychiatric disorder are biological. To the contrary, fMRI brain scan research is beginning to show otherwise.

In the second part of this thesis, I compare Western practices of dealing with mental illness with those of catholic indigenous communities of Taiwan which still today practice Shamanism. Relevant to this discussion are the mechanisms by which these Shamanic communities, that also practice Catholicism, deal with the problem of mental illness. The fact that these Shamanic practices are still in existence today, despite the fact that these communities are catholic, indicates that their practices serve a specific function in dealing with mental illness which cannot be replaced or fulfilled by Western practices.

The comparison between Western and Shamanic practices is important in that it has a bearing on how we deal with mental health stigma. The most obvious differences are that Western methods exacerbate stigma in that our practices not only attempt to solve the problems around mental illness but also produce and help to increase mental health cases in the world today; while Shamanic cultures see mental illness as a community problem, rather than just an individual one, and as such attend to it in ways which are free from stigma and related problems. Western ways exacerbate stigma because mental illness in the Western world is dramatically increasing annually, despite the billions and efforts that we throw at the problem; while those of Shamanic communities often lead to recovery and therefore the elimination of stigma.

There is evidence to suggest that mental illness should be approached in holistic terms and towards this end both the best of Western practices and the best of Shamanic practices could be combined to give us an ideal method of helping sufferers into recovery or learning better copying skills.

There are many reasons why mental illness is rapidly increasing in the Western world. Our social system, based on greed, selfishness and disregard for the human environment has certainly contributed to this increase; but it is also our fascination with medication, with medical intervention and research based on mental health as disease that is not helping at all. That Western medication has helped in certain cases is true. But, in the big scheme of things, it would seem that more harm than good has derived from Western tendencies to resort to medication first at the cost of valuable holistic approaches.  It is true that both medication and therapy have been found to help sufferers with mental illness of various kinds but, it is also a fact that without support and the reduction of stigma, which calls for the integration of sufferers into the society, we are losing the battle. We need to reduce stigma and an analysis of Shamanic practices may assist us in showing just how this could be possible. End of the abstract.

What would a mature student like me require to continue his or her studies into a Masters Degree? Some support is needed because I do suffer with a mental disability and, on top of it, I am also a migrant. Bureaucratic procedures can often be a great obstacle for applying student with mental illness and universities should assist students like me to apply, making the application process as user friendly as possible. It is the application process that can be used, as a hidden tool, to exclude disabled people, especially those with mental disabilities.

Universities should have special people who facilitate the application process. Only once have I found this support in place, in nine years of trying to enter into a Masters, when I applied at Sydney University, Cumberland Campus, and where both Dr. Carol O’Donnell and the disability officer of that University had gone out of their way to help me. Unfortunately, my wife developed skin cancer which was terribly upsetting for me at the time. She had two operations and while this was going on we had trouble where we lived, in a government house, where there were criminals, drug addicts and alcoholics making our lives miserable. Fortunately, the government has moved us to a safer place but unfortunately these problems prevented me from studying properly at the time and I was also forced to discontinue. Nevertheless, these things should be taken into consideration  by Universities at all times.

To this day, I continue to try to gain entrance into a Masters degree not just for me, or for selfish reasons, but for other students who, like me, may find themselves at the mercy of a cruel and unfair system which tends to exclude them from social participation. It is not important whether I succeed or not for in so doing I am making people aware of the problems and obstacles that are a barrier to the inclusion of people like me.

In universities today, we have a dominant voice, a middle class voice, which follows the Status Quo, the dominant way of doing things. We need to make room for other voices, voices of sufferers like me that we desperately need to include in academic discourse. The advancement of knowledge is not based on following excellence in writing and grammatical skills alone, for we have today many quality editors and writers, but very limited diversity of ideas and perspectives which could help us better understand the problem of mental illness and what to do about it. Clearly, in this attempt, we have failed for despite our great efforts, there is no doubt that mental illness is fast increasing. After all, if I had not written this paper, we would have missed out on an important perspective of a migrant and a sufferer who is willing to share his experiences so that I may be able to help others and make academics understand the nature of the problems that can affect someone like me and how the system is unable to help.

Below is another abstract which I had sent to a University in order to gain entrance into a Masters Degree. I wasn’t able to get anywhere with it but I know that I was told that it wasn’t sufficient and that I would have to work on it and resend it, without any mention of any help or guidance:

Internal victim versus non-internal victim positions: perceptions of mental health stigma in the Central Coast Area of New South Wales.

The main aim of the research is to analyses an important change in my perception of stigma as a sufferer. In particular it is to trace the move away from the social position of the victim, a position that too often people with mental disabilities assume, possibly because of lack of the right education, poor education in the society manifested in prejudice and discrimination and many other factors that will be explored in this research.

It is to move away from a position were, writing of my own experiences, my behaviour was often a self-fulfilling prophecy that ensured that wherever I went, whoever I was with, I’d experience discrimination; to a position where I do not hide my mental disability, but neither do I advertise it. I treat it in the way someone else may cope with diabetes, or rheumatoid arthritis. This is what I call ‘technology of the self’ or the ability to change one’s perception on life to make the world more bearable. However, mental disorders are not proper illnesses as such. Mental disorder is very different from diabetes because there is much that both the society and the sufferer can do to improve bipolar disorder. In the case of diabetes only medication and adequate nutrition can directly improve the condition. The disorder is partly generated by the environment. For example the World Health Organization (WHO Alma-Ata, 1978), declared that provision of adequate education, health care, employment and leisure is correlated to the physical and mental health of the population.

In changing ourselves we can change our perception of the outer world as well. Stigma is always out there. Somewhere and somehow we are likely to find it. Mental health stigma works in very pervasive and hidden ways and this is relevant to the study of other disadvantaged social groups.

This thesis will be divided in two major sections. In the first section, I explores the concept of bipolar disorder both as a personal experience, the experience of other sufferers with whom I am exchanging emails on a daily basis, and as it is defined in various research and literature.

In the second part of the research, I will approach some sufferers with bipolar disorder.  These consumers will be divided into two groups, namely: normal to high achievers (who do not suffer from internalized stigma); and the other group who feel overwhelmed by stigma, and are in victim mode. In such qualitative research many variables will need to be considered. For example, it is plausible to speculate that disadvantaged people of lower socio economic environments will be more likely to be overwhelmed by stigma because of various social problems that they may encounter.

POSSIBLE RESEARCH METHODS

In a previous research paper completed as part of my undergraduate assignment in the subject ‘research methods in sociology and social anthropology’ (SOCA 352) I found that there is a strong correlation between socio economic status and mental disorders. The research took at its starting point the assumption that a study of Housing stress can reveal much mental stress and depression. For its framework, the research drew upon interpretative and critical approaches to methodology, as detailed by Newman (1994:ch4). Following Newman I attempted to discover what was meaningful to people regarding the problem of housing stress and how they perceived what was happening to them in terms of developing a mental disorder.

I interviewed a number of people from various socio economics background and I remember that at the time I was the first to write about the homeless people who live along the F3 freeway on the hills in natural caves. Similarly, I intend to find out what is meaningful and relevant to people who are experiencing stigma both in the ‘internal victim’ and the ‘external victim’ positions. I anticipate that this will not be an easy exercise and that I will have some problems, particularly from an ethical perspective,  because it can be stressful for people with mental disorders to talk about stigma openly.

The pilot study of the research on housing stress revealed a number of contradictions between common perception and lived reality. It also revealed limitations in the research design, which then provided the opportunity for re-design of existing questions and opened areas for enquiry that had not been previously considered. I anticipate that this will happen again with the qualitative research on stigma.

The research method will comprise qualitative research with both open-ended questions and structured questions. I will try to device processes that may help me to show consumers how they could move from the ‘internal victim position’ to the ‘non-internal victim position’ in order to achieve a happier existence.

This was another topic that could have been developed into a thesis proposal. Again I could not find any supervisor to help me develop it:

Ubuntu: a definition of human intelligence

Alfredo Zotti

Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means “humanity to others”. That’s why this word is the name of computer software freely available to all people: the Linux distribution that brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world. Ubuntu is also a large international digital community (or network) comprising hundreds of people who are computer programmers, artists, photographers, poets and academics all working towards the creation of this complex software that includes a sophisticated computer operating system, word processor, spreadsheets, database, presentations and all that is necessary to go online. It gives the third world the possibility to gain access to the Internet, therefore providing education to some of the most needy people in the world.

I find this Ubuntu digital community inspiring and I argue that the whole of society needs a similar voluntary effort to bring a better life to disadvantaged people and to preserve the human environment. This book is aimed at improving the welfare of our children and the idea that our world belongs to our future generations. I have appropriated the word Ubuntu here to name this ideological framework that could facilitate a better world. Much of the effort of this book is to talk about this ideological and complex framework. I attempt to apply the theoretical ideas of Geoffrey Samuel and Pierre Bourdieu, which I believe are conducive to an ideological environment that can facilitate the inclusion of disadvantaged members of society into mainstream discourse.

Does society have a place for the disadvantaged? Certainly, in gaols, living on the streets, or exploited in dead-end jobs. For those holding power it is very useful to have an underclass who are desperate to improve their lot and whose circumstances are such that exploited workers are afraid to join their ranks. This book proposes a framework based on anthropology that examines how to include such people into a mainstream discourse for the creation of social policies. We need policies that will be accepted by disadvantaged groups who want to gain the benefits of joining the wider society, bringing about adequate social justice.

The book is divided into three main interconnected chapters. In the Ubuntu section I propose a kind of natural science and anthropological framework that could, in theory, provide the right environment for the inclusion of disadvantaged members of society into mainstream discourse. This leads to mechanisms for the creation of social policies with two features: willingly accepted and used by those who need them (as such disadvantaged groups would want to join the wider society and cooperate towards their own liberation); and they can be easily delivered to make a real difference in the world and bring about a more developed and adequate social justice.

In the second section titled “social intelligence”, I propose that we urgently need to gain some freedom from academic vanity. Decision makers have attitudes that automatically lead to discrimination. To argue this I include various discussions in short essay format such as: “The disadvantage of Australian Aboriginals within the court system”; “Stigma in mental illness” with a discussion about problems with the law and our society.

In the last section of the book, I explore the forces that have shaped our thinking and suggest problem areas such as our understanding of human nature, alternative lifestyles and what is possible for a better future. I suggest that we are missing important variables when faced with the life of disadvantaged people such as the mentally ill and Aboriginal

I am writing this book for the welfare of our children so that one day they may say that there were people genuinely interested in the welfare of the human environment and our world.

There are people like myself who think differently but there is no space for us in academia.

People vary enormously, and this enriches our world. We need to provide dignity and equality for all, regardless of their background, problems or handicaps. And yet, institutions like Universities have no place for certain ways of departing from the norm. Academic writing continues to be very focused and specialized. Yet, I believe, we need to expand our intellectual horizons if we are to deal with complexities. This alone can lead us to better policy delivery.

NOTE: this thesis proposal was submitted as part of a Masters thesis application. Two Universities have rejected it for the following reason: “we have no suitable supervisor”.

This is another idea for a possible theses. It was sent to a couple of Universities in Australia but even with this thesis I found it impossible to get an offer:

Abstract

The concept of a utopian society has been in the minds of people since the times of Plato. The word utopia has today gained mythical quality, given the widespread belief that a utopian society is not achievable. This is because all previous attempts at an alternative society have failed.  The demise of communism in Russia and China serves to support this belief.

The term utopia, however, is not fixed and, like all language, needs to be defined. If by utopian society one means a “perfect” society free from all problems and evils, it is indeed difficult to believe that such a society could one day be realized. On the other hand, if one takes the word utopia to mean an “ideal” society not free from problems but one that has no alienated labour, no surplus value, where private property is shared and is based on respect for the human environment, then it is not difficult to imagine that such a society is not only possible but must be achieved for the preservation of the human environment.

Past and present failures of capitalism, communism and anarchism are all due, arguably,  to one fundamental problem: that of ego. The fact that some indigenous communities of Australia, Africa and Papua New Guinea have succeeded in terms of achieving a sustainable environment tells us that societies in which a person cannot conceive of existing apart from the group, in which private property is readily shared, have a consensus decision making style, do not look on themselves as owning the land but as belonging to it, and live in dynamic sustainable balance with their environment are an ideal alternative model.

Indeed history, and prehistory, tells us that Homo Sapiens thrived precisely because of the ability to live and share with other members of the community (Ape-man: A story of Human Evolution Rod Caird Author and Robert Foley Editor). This is where Neanderthal man failed ( because of being a loner and lacking a communal spirit.)  Somehow along the way we have lost this ability to live together in harmony with each other and the environment and our very existence is in question.

This thesis attempts to show how it could be possible to get back that community spirit, an effort which requires an approach based partly on social ecology studies; on the social-anthropology of sustainable hunter gatherers societies; on  Psychology studies; and on the philosophy of many outstanding scholars such as Paolo Freire, Karl Marx, Murray Bookchin, Pierre Bourdieu, Manuel Castells and many others. Finally, I propose a possible sustainable society which I name the Ubuntu Gift Economy.  As a case study, I attempt to suggest how a Ubuntu Gift Economy would deal with the problem of mental disorders.

I believe that it is important to think about  and discuss Utopias  because in so doing we expose problems with our present system and it gives a chance to propose theoretical solutions and enter into constructive debate.

other two abstracts:

Housing stress and mental illness

Alfredo Zotti

ABSTRACT

The World Health Organization  (WHO Alma- Ata, 1978), declared that Housing is an indicator of wellbeing. The WHO also declared that provision of adequate education, health care, employment and leisure is correlated to the physical and mental health of the population.

Financial housing stress is an important aspect of housing need. Current measures

used to estimate the housing stress of the Australian population are limited. In this

paper I have appropriated the term “housing stress”  to be more inclusive of  social

problems such as homelessness, location disadvantage, high and unsuitable cost of

housing in respect to one’s income or a family’s income and lack of government

housing provisions for the more disadvantaged sector of the Australian population.

In other words, rather than argue about what housing stress exactly is and enter in a complex

economic debate,  I expose problem areas to do with housing that may be

conceptualized as elements of housing stress. In this sense I consider housing stress to

be linked  to and to have a negative impact on  the mental health of the population.

This paper is an attempt to provide evidence to support the hypothesis that there is a

strong correlation between housing stress and mental disorders.  In this paper I

attempt to give a human face to the many cold statistics that inform us about people’s

misfortunes and socio economic disadvantage by interviewing people who are experiencing

housing stress.

It is also a kind of preparatory study for a thesis that will attempts to argue that governments

have not yet begun to put a price to negative social-economic factors such as homelessness (and related problems such as alcoholism and drug addiction)  that affect  the Australian  population which are generated by major inequalities built into the structures of Australian  society.  When this cost is fully considered it becomes obvious that neglect to provide  basic needs such as adequate housing to the Australian population results in higher cost to tax payers and governments in terms of crime, illness, alcoholism and drug addiction, homelessness and poverty to name a few.

One of the major contributors to mental illness, a barrier to recovery and/or sufferers’ ability to better cope with mental illness, is homelessness. Using a sample of 26 homeless people who suffer with mental illness, from my pilot study on homelessness and mental illness, I attempt to expose the experiences of the subjects not only in terms of their disadvantageous situation but also in terms of the support that they receive from government agencies and what could be done to improve their situation. One important aspect of my pilot study on homelessness is that I was the first to interview people who lived in caves, along the F3 freeway on the Central Coast of New South Wales, and to also to show just how disadvantaged the Central Coast region of New South Wales is.

The anthropology of “mental illness”.

alfredo zotti

The globalisation of the Western conception of mental health and illness

The modern narrative of mental illness, of the Western world, is fast gaining supremacy over all other cultural narratives. According to this narrative mental illness is to be treated… “like a “brain diseases” over which the patient has little choice or responsibility”  (Watters, 2009, p:6). These ideas of mental illness as biological defects, according to the logic of the West, would lead to fewer stigmas. As Watters argues (ibid) once supernatural forces, character flaw or semen loss is ruled out sufferers will not be blamed directly and will be helped by the medical approach.  A question that comes to mind is this: has the Western narrative, based on the biological model of mental illness, reduced stigma and made life easier for sufferers?

Evidence from research, literature and sufferers’ personal experiences, indicate that under this narrative sufferers are treated more harshly; they are more likely to be alienated from family and friends; they are often excluded from work opportunities and education. The level of prejudice and stigma, in the Western world, has not improved but worsened sufferers’ quality of life.

The high level of suicide, increasing incidence of mental disorders and related problem indicates that the situation is further deteriorating.  Under the ideological veil of promise and hope there is an ocean of despair, confusion and hopelessness.  Most alarmingly, this narrative has turned into a myth the “myth of mental illness”. The myth has been overturned into a natural state of affair. The myth is so powerful and pervasive… “it’s almost invisible like the air we breathe” (Linford and Arden 2009: p,17).

The American Diagnostic Manual (DSM-IV) includes a section on “culture-bound syndromes.”  Pages 845 to 849 of the manual are dedicated to Koro, Amok and other similar cultural specific conditions which are now been replaced by the global narrative. As Watters argues, the attention that these cultural syndromes are given, which is definite proof that mental illness is a cultural, is highly inadequate… “ they might as well be labelled “Psychiatric Exotica: Two Bits a Gander.” (Watters, 2009, p: 6).

It is my intention to write this chapter based on the attempt to exposes the syndromes of past cultures to contribute to the understanding on the cultural construction of psychological disorders.

These constructions are based on myths. To help sufferers learn to live fulfilling lives with their mental disorders requires that we move away from myths as far as possible and base our efforts on evidence based methods. Evidence based approached indicate to us two important facts: that symptoms and understandings of psychological disorders are constructions infused with cultural ideas, habits and predisposition of a particular people; and that the dominant ideology and derived myths needs to be studied more closely because it inflates stigma and is unhelpful to sufferers. What this chapter will argue is that Western mental illness is both culture-bound and that persuading people to believe in Western-style mental illness can affect the way that psychic disorders manifest.

All science is based on an imperfect model of reality. Scientific research extracts similarities and ties them down to various factors. During this process, the unique characteristics of the individual are lost; secondly, jargon of psychoanalysis disparages rather than describes mental anguish. This is not to say that all medical discoveries are useless and that science has not helped people who suffer from mental anguish. Indeed psychiatric medications which are the product of medical science can save lives, particularly in situations where sufferers do not have enough knowledge and are unable to help themselves through mindfulness. The real problem is that psychiatric medication today is overused, over prescribed and seen as the only solution. The reality is that medication is a crutch and only helps if sufferers are willing to help themselves. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and self help methods can be very helpful in most cases of mental anguish. I suggest that most of our mental anguish is created by us as I have discussed in the chapter on Childhood traumas. But it is also true that we are unable to understand that there are two dimensions to human consciousness: the Western scientific view of reality based on the idea that matter is primary and consciousness is a property of complex material patterns; and the mystical view of consciousness where consciousness is the primary reality, the essence of all Universes and everything in it. It follows that while the scientific approach sees mental anguish as a purely biological illness to be cured by chemical alterations or genetically the truth is that there is a purely psychological and spiritual dimension to mental anguish that is mostly neglected. This is why many sufferers see themselves as an illness often claiming: “I am Bipolar” or “I am schizophrenic”. This, sounds like people are an actual illness not individuals who suffer. Why is this possible? What can we do about it? This is the focus of much of this chapter.

Mental illness has three dimensions; the biological one; the socio/cultural one; and the psychological one. We need to attend to the three dimensions if we are to help sufferers. Focusing excessively on both the biological nature of mental illness, neglecting the socio/cultural and psychological dimensions, leads to tremendous problems.

One early morning, I remember that it was about 4 am, knowing that Katy Sara Culling was often up, unable to sleep, I decided to send her an email and there she was sitting at her computer. She replied almost instantly. We started a discussion on mixed episodes  http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/reprint/165/8/1048.pdf of which I have direct experience, where mania and depression are experienced concurrently or at very fast interval that can last a couple of minutes to a few seconds (mine is a milder form called hypomania mixed with mild depression) .

Katy suffered a more severe form of bipolar and mixed episode than me and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know how one could cope with more severe mixed episodes than mine. For me it is a tremendous struggle. For Katy it must have been hell. If you don’t have experience of what it is like, don’t even try to understand it. It is simply impossible.

At the time I was helping a number of sufferers with mixed episodes and I remember that a few interesting issues surfaced: there is not enough research of mixed episodes precisely because such research would require the input of sufferers directly and, as we know, it is difficult to find sufferers involved in research for a number of reasons including stigma and general ignorance; people who suffer with mixed episodes tend to be more prone to commit suicide, especially after multiple episodes, where the mind becomes so overwhelmed and exhausted by the rapid fluctuation of moods, from one extreme of joy and elation to despair, and where one feels as if s/he was sucked into a black hole and then violently pushed up, by a tremendous force,  into the stratosphere; and while depression can lead to suicide, in mixed episodes it is the mania that is most dangerous because during mania the mind does not think clearly and that is when an attempted suicide can turn into a completed suicide.

Katy loved life and the people whom she helped and the reason why she ended her life is, in my humble opinion, due to mania experienced immediately after a deep depression. We had spoken about this at length and it was clear that both Katy and I wanted more sufferers in research. But for this to happen, universities need to change and make more room for sufferers; they need to facilitate things so that access is possible and, in particularly, they need to learn how to support students in distress. In this sense we have a long way to go, but we do desperately need sufferers in research.

No sufferer with bipolar is equal to any other sufferer and each bipolar disorder is different from anyone else’s. There are many interventions that can help based on pharmacological, psychological and sociological interventions. However, it is clear that we need all of the three, particularly in more serious cases like that of Katy.  In addition, there is need of more studies to find the right medication. For mixed episodes, it is extremely difficult to find the right medication and, to this day, I don’t think there is a suitable medication. Antidepressants can lead to mania and anti psychotics are not really indicated for depression. These are the tremendous difficulties that we face today.  I am fortunate that my bipolar and mixed episodes are mild which means that I can cope without medication but for more severe cases it is simply impossible.

When we begin to understand these difficulties, we also begin to understand the desperate need of having sufferers involved in the research. Without the sufferer’s input we are shooting blanks and we won’t be able to advance very much. But here is the difficulty: in order to include sufferers into the research, universities need to change their structures and matching ideologies. We are ignorant and we don’t know what bipolar really is. We have a broad term that covers the bare minimums in terms of basic characteristic of the disorder but we need to go much deeper and to understand that each bipolar case is different and unique and each sufferer requires tailor made therapy. In a world where we rely on mass production of anti depressant and anti psychotics the aim is to treat everyone as they were equally affected by a disorder of which we know little or nothing.

Katy was a gifted person who really loved people. For mental health advocates the death of Katy is a tremendous loss. She was extremely helpful and always knew how to say the right thing. I always told her that compared to her I was arrogant, a bit odd, and that people did not immediately take to me. I am a kind of person that you either like or dislike with not much in between. Katy was different in that she was always nice and everyone liked her. In any case, I have managed to create an online community of sufferers and we all help each other. Both Katy and I helped people as volunteers but I am not as efficient as Katy was. I guess that we do the best that we can with what we know and what we have available.

What I wanted to say here is that Katy loved her friends and loved helping people. She could simply not go on and I know why:  her mixed episodes were so much more severe than mine. It was  impossible for her to cope with such disorder and there is no help for it today.  That is why we need to do more research and to include sufferers into this research so that we can find solutions which should be based on holistic approached where the RIGHT medication, therapy, support and stigma reduction all combine to bring relief.

Alfredo Zotti

This special edition of the A.S.C. journal contains two papers written by Dr. Carol O’Donnell, http://www.carolodonnell.com.au/   who was a lecturer at the University of Sydney. Today she is a retired academic, but continues to work as a volunteer, in her attempt to educate society. Her papers are powerful and inspirational and, as you will find, she has a deep understanding of current policies and government structures. Her suggestions, in terms of the direction that governments and bureaucratic systems should take, are visionary.

Alfredo Zotti

Papers written by Dr. Carol O’Donnell:

CAN CAN: KICKING AGAINST THE PRICKS A VIOLENT RESPONSE TO THREATENING GLOBAL LEGAL ABUSE

The ALRC direction on family and related violence is wrong, wrong, wrong!

This submission to the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) inquiry into family violence addresses key proposals in the ALRC discussion paper summary ‘Family Violence – Commonwealth Laws’, on the assumption that the autonomous adult ideally has a right to know the apparent truth.  People should hear it broadly, early and often or they are likely to be improperly rehearsed for life and to make poorer decisions through lack of better practice. The roles of open and independent news, education, entertainment and promotional media are therefore also vital for free and protective social development.

I was recently in the US, where US Homeland Security sensibly says, ‘If you see something, say something’, thus increasing the potential of the total population for better communication to deal with possible terror which may spring from any source.   In its paper on family violence, the ALRC appears alternatively intent on creating police states based on trying to restrain family members from any loose talk in order to maintain many apparently kindred and professional secrets in highly straightened conditions of communication and so understanding.  I fled such ignorant situations throughout life as they drove me nuts.  In being polite, one may also risk being badly misunderstood, even if one is already an exceptionally smooth communicator talking to peers already in the professional know.  Many simply fall silent when cast in verbal circumstances.  In my case, however, the strong desire to smash their teeth in led me to higher education levels.

Under the ALRC proposed circumstances, where many more professionals appear set to claim to protectively keep the hidden keys to individual financial, biological or other status, behaviour and related secrets, it could be impossibly costly for any person to guess who is, or who should, or should not be – caring for, supporting, supervising or hurting or relying upon whom – either ideally or in real life.  That surmise will be the privileged information of an increasing number of lawyers, which means it is only available to be revealed at great cost in court.  More open disclosure is the best protection against family violence, however defined.  Later, Mirabella’s action is discussed in a related estate management case.  It is argued that as an old man’s ex-girlfriend, executor and possible will beneficiary, she should also have been more forthcoming about his financial affairs. On the other hand, one can see many good reasons why she would not be.  How common.

The first key ALRC proposal, 3-1 is:

that the Social Security Act 1991(Cth) should be amended to provide that family violence is violent or threatening behaviour, or any other form of behaviour, that coerces and controls a family member, or causes that family member to be fearful (p. 10).

It is foolish to make no clear distinction between talking to people on one hand and acting upon their bodies on the other, as the ALRC wants to do in its definition.  Firstly, an autonomous person ideally can and should try to talk on equal terms to anybody they feel might help them solve a pressing problem.  Google, politicians, teachers, police or many others may assist.  Personal truth in speech may be highly emotional and wrong when seen broadly and calmly.  Nevertheless, my story matters.  To define words as violent is wrong.  It is authoritarian speech as the vital distinction between any physical reality and social perception has been wiped out.  It is important to avoid this as it leads to rubbish policy making.  For example, US citizens think guns protect them yet the US has by far the highest murder rate in the OECD.   What people think is so, is often not so.  When this seems the case it should be pointed out clearly.  Otherwise many lies are perpetuated.

The global financial crisis was driven by this sort of constant lying about concrete reality.

The ALRC position yet again encourages matters into the authoritarian hands of people with vested professional interests in seeing states as ideally being regulated by feudal law and the supporting medical assumptions that biological states ideally and naturally rule all personal worlds through related perceptions.  Hence the animal spirits of the markets drive fatty foods, drugs and all related higher vocations.  The ALRC position is spawned by pressure towards US political faith in gambling, in which stock prices are wrongly defined as a reflection of business reality and the role of government is constantly market driven back to defense of faith in the American dream, assisted by legal and financial service providers and a wide caste of related and lesser paid professional handmaidens in universities and elsewhere.   We need better planned ways forward, as proposed in attachments, as the US policy direction naturally leads to more guns and more inequality.

The ALRC claims to be working towards autonomous individuals but is rowing in the opposite direction by wanting to keep information from people and claiming it is for their protection.  All knowledge is power towards flourishing life or death. OECD Guidelines on Privacy naturally assist more reliably protective communication and data gathering.  In the longer run, openness appears the only protection against feudal or tribal ignorance, tyranny and related want and destruction.  (Unlike Jesus, I’ve so far had no real trouble but still keep my fingers crossed.  Look at me and hurry up and fix the house and garden.)

The ALRC paper claims to seek ‘seamlessness’ which apparently is ‘ensuring that from the point of view of those engaging with the legal frameworks in which issues of family violence and child abuse arise, the key focus must be upon the experience of those participants – to see the system through their eyes’ (p.3).  However, the writers have already defined violent or threatening behaviour as being any kind that a person claims to feel frightened by, so have aligned themselves automatically with a single complainant.  The fact that a person finds a spider threatening does not make it so and risks the ignorant mistreatment of spiders.  The same is true of people. This biased ALRC view is not the way to find the truth.  Any mother who acts in such a fashion with siblings has at least known them both intimately for years and one hopes that she wishes neither any harm.

The ALRC takes a far from logical or reasonable place from which to start assisting or judging any matter, especially if those engaged in the inquiry claim to value ‘autonomy’ as distinct from ‘paternalism’ (p. 7).  An autonomous person who feels frightened (affronted?) would respond to a matter of upset themselves.  In a university, for example, if persons were upset by the words of a colleague, they should not run secretly to the dean to sort out their upset state for them by quizzing it to silence it or to ban it on their behalf.   This destroys the fabric of what the institution is ideally set up to do, which is to protect sceptical debate to assist more open scientific and cultural development.  Downgrading the concept of violence to ban unwanted speech creates more problems than it resolves.

The legal mind always tries to fix lack of clarity or sense in law by simply adding to it.

For example, the Commonwealth Ombudsman appears to think the ALRC definition would ‘potentially minimise the need for a person to retell their story and obtain different types of evidence for agencies they will commonly need to approach when experiencing or fleeing family violence such as Centrelink and child support agencies’ (p. 4).  As the

ALRC discussion paper supports a National Legal Response which seeks ‘to ensure that legal responses to family violence are fair and just’ (i.e. driven by courts and lawyers) the Ombudsman’s wish seems highly unlikely to bear fruit.  Is he accusing Centrelink and child support agencies of being violent?  Should anybody complaining about domestic violence be found a house to live in?  If so, who should pay for this and how?

The above are not idle questions about how to improve all property management services, on which we all depend for somewhere to sleep and work, let alone fairly. They also relate to how to provide more manufacturing jobs driven by more sensible approaches to service.  As the Minister for Resources, Energy and Tourism recently pointed out at Sydney Uni. China currently accounts for over 40% of the world’s primary resource consumption and millions live per day on less than the cost of a cup of coffee at Sydney Uni.  For any who care about meritocracy, let alone equality of opportunity or the poor, TV and other information sources have been available for years at much better quality and less cost than those generated by professional education and related service methods.  Planning service provision to improve the quality and breadth of all services to people should ideally also be the generational lever for many greener jobs in manufacturing.  However, certainly do not expect Martin Ferguson to accept it, especially if wearing his mining hat.  Australian and Chinese interests in better health and education universally could be fruitfully generated in mines safety and related partnerships in Broken Hill.

As lawyers, the ALRC writers naturally discuss the importance of privacy without consideration of the benefits of disclosure.  Yet public disclosure of the apparent truth – which is the complete antithesis of individual or feudal privacy – has been the key principle of women’s emancipation and related movements for more equal rights for homosexuals, blacks and many other people, at least until lawyers got all their related communities under increasingly mythic control as income sources for mates.  The most protective game for people who are wronged in comparatively fair societies, like Australia, is usually open disclosure and ideally they have the UN Declaration of Human Rights and related community sentiments about equal treatment or equality of opportunity on their side.  Judge Judy on TV appears as a model of US public education.  Would we differ much?  Related management directions are in directions attached and on www.Carolodonnell.com.au

The article ‘It’s time to put money into the equation’ reports that economist Steve Keen pointed out that orthodox economic models of how the economy works do not incorporate money and debt (SMH 26.9.11, Business p. 3.). This invisibility of the power of financial service also helped Wall Street speculators and lawyers to obscure and distort production to take more money for their related ‘services’. The George Soros Institute for New Economic Thinking gave Steve $125,000 to make a model to fix the problem starting with bank loans.  However, Steve predicted Australian house prices would lose 40% in value after the 2008 global financial crisis.  Ever since the crash I’d instead been ringing my hands with glee that I’d put pre-retirement money into helping my daughter buy a flat, instead of into superannuation or anywhere else advised by experts.  Grow up.

Disclosure and related communication are on the path likely to lead to more public and individual knowledge and hence to much less anxiety about the unknown. The ALRC is retreating from the value of open information, autonomy and all forms of better communication in the public and individual interest, in order to support and extend even more expensive, dysfunctional red tape and related forms of hidden or unclear being and action.  Their view of domestic violence calls for more expensive mafia-like protections writ large by comparatively sheltered women.  What else is new?  Open the books to deal with questions without hiding.  The ALRC fights the last war.  It takes more than cake.

Cumulatively wrong ALRC directions and the example of Sophie’s wrong choice (Those poor Greek girls are so mixed up)

There must be recognition of the historical context of any problem in order to judge or resolve it fairly.  One may also want to know about all the money involved in any issue as lots of people may wish to hide it, or may think or pretend there is more or less than there is, for various reasons.  The intended ALRC direction in domestic violence will present huge and cumulative problems for fair and effective work and estate management and for all related public policy settings and data gathering, including in commerce, housing, taxation and investment.  This is because women’s and therefore men’s lot has changed a such a lot since reliable birth control was made available to women for the first time in history, slightly before the 1975 no-fault divorce.  One can only judge fairly on the basis of information about particular circumstances and often aimless laws grown like Topsy.

Women’s demands for equal treatment with men at work also led to the passage of anti-discrimination legislation and to removal of many practices which had prevented females doing traditionally male education or jobs or remaining in paid work if married.  The male wage was expected to support a wife and two children on the largely true assumption that nobody married had, or could have, much decent or effective control over reproduction.  My mother’s generation needed a husband’s earnings that my daughter’s should not.  My generation has been between dependant and autonomous status.  Adversarial law cannot deal with the human diversity of family misery, as Tolstoy clearly saw.  Open the books.

When I was young there was concern police saw domestic violence as a private matter between partners, in which it was undesirably dangerous for them to intervene. The book ‘Family Violence in Australia’, which I co-wrote in 1982, dealt with related problems.  It seemed to us then, that as the comparatively powerless people in de-facto relationships which were typically socially stigmatized, women de-factos ought to have the same or similar protections and benefits as wives, who were traditionally expected to care for the daily and extended family welfare, supported until death mainly by a single male wage.

There is ideally and in fact more equality of opportunity between most men and women today than before 1975, and either partner may logically choose de-facto status with the aim of protecting their independence and assets against any future risks to their well-being that they may associate with a partner’s behaviour.  Today it therefore seems a mistake to treat de-facto couples as if they had decided to marry.  One assumes men and women should ideally be encouraged to act increasingly autonomously and broadly, to protect any children of their union from any emotional or physical harm which might be done to them by aggrieved persons.  In any wind-up of affairs the antidote to distrust is ideally open-book judgment by others in any communities they trust, to help them sort out problems.  What consenting adults arrange ideally is their own choice, but children need protection.

Estate management and many related public, charitable and private investment directions require more openly informed consideration in related regional contexts.  For example, the article ‘Mirabella in hot seat over QC lover’s dying days’ in the Sydney Morning Herald (23.9.11, News 7) raises many policy related questions about matters usually shrouded in mystery.  Take the changing relationships which may nowadays occur between older men, perhaps towards the end of their careers, who have already had families, and younger women who have just started out on various careers, since the advent of effective birth control and no-fault divorce in 1975.  There was a time when men might be expected to pay unseen for everything?  Not any more?  Confusion reigns.

Anyhow, the story is that for some years the live-in lover of Sophie Panopoulos, when she was starting out on her career in law and politics in the late 1990s, was a QC, forty years her senior.  Later she became Sophie Mirabella and is now the opposition spokeswoman for innovation, industry and science. The earlier relationship was cordially accepted by the QC’s adult offspring, who appear to have often worked overseas, and whose mother is not mentioned.  Should one assume she had died a lot earlier and so needed no support?  I guess not.  In 2011 the QC died at the age of 83 after a fall while living in a farmhouse about 400 metres from Sophie’s house.  (They made a risky choice.  He had a good innings.  She looked after him?  What more do you want?)

In 2006, Panopoulos married and became Mirabella.  The QC told his offspring he had given Sophie $100,000 so the new couple could buy a house in her electorate at Wangaratta.  He asked they keep this a secret.  However, Lesley and Mervyn, the QC’s offspring, were concerned about this apparent gift and asked Mirrabella about it.  She became angry and cut off contact.  Their father soon transferred his full power of medical and financial attorney to Mirabella. As the article states, ‘His married ex-girlfriend, the executor and possible beneficiary of his will, was now also to have sole power over his affairs as he aged’.  I guess he had very little money left to live autonomously, but was too embarrassed to be truthful about it.  I guess that Sophie was angry that her good faith towards him and as a solicitor should be questioned under the real circumstances of the case and that Lesley and Mervyn might try to start ordering her life about.  I guess this on the basis that you may take the family out of Greece but you can’t take the Greek family out of the girl.   How could she possibly stop caring for such a close old friend or lover?

Apparently it is clear to the siblings that their father’s positive feelings for Mirabella did not waver, before or after her marriage, but they ask ‘Did she do the right thing’. They insist they are not after their father’s money and he made it clear to them they should expect none.  However, they feel aggrieved that ‘we did not get to see him; we missed a chunk of the last five years of his life’.  On the other hand, these were probably far from the nicest years of the QC’s life and they do not appear to have tried very hard to see him.  My guess is that for various reasons he had had a sharply diminishing amount of money in his later life and that Sophie Mirabella has been comparatively kind in not shutting off from her parental obligations in regard to a key relationship of her youth, especially if it had become more onerous and obsolete to her.  What more would you expect of a dutiful, busy, ambitious, Greek daughter and lawyer?  (She should have opened up the books!)

I knew a mature-aged male student who married a Spaniard who had been in Australia for twenty years.  The Catholic Church had looked after her mother in Madrid over her many declining years but the two turned up shortly before her death and appeared aggrieved by the idea that the church would claim her apartment.  To put it mildly, I am no fan of the Catholic positions on marriage, birth control, sexual practices and expectations about death.  However, I guess it must be common that a religious welfare state is naturally provided to old people in Catholic communities which younger generations have left.  The Mirabella case is welcomed – not as a threat but as an opportunity to open lots of books in order to deliver a wide range of services better to people.  Related discussions attached.

To all lawyers, doctors and others who naturally and increasingly value the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology, this is a Jungian approach to faith and public matters. God was revealed to Jung in his dreams of a huge crystal cathedral with a roof suddenly shattered by His Giant Poo. (This Poo was not golden, like that beside Sony in Tokyo.)  Jung accordingly realized from his recurrent dream that he must challenge the religious authority of his pastor father in order to meet the international and internal needs of faith or belief, including his own, which he now felt he foolishly trampled upon himself.  He later challenged a symbolic father, Freud, who appeared to have been inordinately clingy and dominating at the same time, particularly with Jung, who was very busy.  Freud had an exceptionally good lot of excuses for his objectionable behaviour.  What are yours?

Nowadays, fortunately, there appears to be a completely new Papal approach to managing risk, even in Rome. (You’d better believe it.)  According to an article ‘Condom incident threatens papal visit’ (SMH World 26.4.2010, p. 6) a Vatican spokesman, Father Frederico Lombardi, told the Italian bishops’ conference:

‘This is the age of truth, transparency and credibility.  Secrecy and discretion, even in their positive aspects, are not values cultivated in contemporary society.  We must be in a position to have nothing to hide’.

Men everywhere will naturally be thrilled to hear it.  The next stage must be learning about the joys of speech and writing. The pen is not so much seen as mightier than the sword, but different to it.  Email and Google are equally exciting.  I write in sisterhood with Mary, praying she gets a better idea where babies come from so key indicators for responsible autonomy – thoughtfully informed personal choice and financial support – can be set up more realistically and cheaply than in the currently dominated regional contexts.

See attached and related discussion of direction in Australia, Afghanistan and beyond.

Cheers,  Carol O’Donnell, St James Court, 10/11 Rosebank St., Glebe, Sydney 2037

a.k.a. Lilith the Magic Pudding, Chief Alternative to Faith

See more on www.Carolodonnell.com.au

NOT KNIGHTS OF A ROUND TABLE BUT HANDS OF A NANNY STATE:  A SUBMISSION TO THE REVIEW OF HIGHER EDUCATION ACCESS AND OUTCOMES FOR ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER PEOPLE

From increasingly democratic perspectives, best practice is ideally open to all

This submission and attachments to the Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People primarily addresses best practice and opportunities for change inside universities and other higher education providers by first outlining the general UN and Australian community directions necessary for more effective, stable and fair development.  From all democratic perspectives, best practice can only be open for all to be able to comparatively judge, learn from and improve upon past performance; so all can learn from past generations to meet the needs and interests of current and future ones.  What else is there to it?

Education is something unpredictable that in the end is right.  I hope you had the time of your life.  (As Gadget, I speak for Elia Kazan).

For effective national workforce development the performance of teachers and all related competencies are ideally conducted and assessed openly, in practice, and as research into the comparative quality and cost of performance.  This may also be seen as anchoring more truthfully productive communication in more truly open markets, as distinct from pursuing more secretive, adversarial and exclusive professional or commercial action.  One can accept the reality that everything is connected to everything else and try to deal with it openly and reasonably, or favour a version of normal behaviour that requires blinding oneself and others by pretending legitimate life always remains in a narrow bunch of professional silos properly divided by ironically named Chinese walls.   These people have a habit of turning truth into their lies, which they then ram down our necks from many podia.  What reason could you have for trusting any of them unless they were part of your family and its close connexions to those in the more expensively credentialed and highly connected know outside your ken?  These people are primitives by the more broadly honest and open standards of behaviour, documentation and teaching we expect.   We are the stewards of our country.   (I am a bit like Dirk Bogarde in Daddy Nostalgie.)

Partly because all heritage is often mixed and clouded in mystery even when researched, it is hard to define an Australian aboriginal or other person, their culture or their heritage effectively.  Ideally, however, our common and diverse international heritage should be honestly explored, protected and/or demonstrated for future generations, whether we or others are valued mainly as part of historical and geographic communities, or as people who travelled to see them.  In Europe, for example, stately homes may be preserved for future generations and foreigners to enjoy, even when those aristocratic families who once owned them, now do not.  All ideally now consider how common global heritage can be better managed by innovative practice.  Bureaucratic and community practice must open and direct greener development more fairly for current and future generations.  This depends on more honest and open communication and debate, as distinct from censorship and narrow rules which have become increasingly restrictive, costly and reality distorting.

Access to higher education and the outcomes of such access for aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander or other people are ideally addressed in related regional, historical, cultural, investigative and developmental projects to protect and enhance our common heritage.  For example see attached discussions of ideal project development principles and related directions and accountabilities in Broken Hill, Sydney and beyond.  Democracies need high quality news and related media, or people are intellectually lost and manipulated whatever their pretensions to democratic development.

From the religious perspective, the idea of the public and related community and individual interest, naturally including that of future generations, may be like God’s Word made Flesh.  The world is ideally His or Their Estate, so managed to ensure life flourishes.  Feudal, tribal and related family life, which many love, is naturally a big part of that life.  Its history is ideally protected  and/or demonstrated with current and future generations while its clerics, philosophers, entertainers and scientists, ideally debate and recruit many enlightening followers on TV, radio, the internet, and in community development ventures of interest to many, whether believers or not.

Rights may be theorized as forged in democratic struggle or as ‘inalienable’ (given by God and embodied in law), which is feudally rather than scientifically constructed, protected and practiced.  ‘Feudal’ describes pre-capitalist modes of production primarily based on conquest and exploitation of land and its product rather than on the increasingly evolved transformation of raw materials for sale as complex products and services.  Capitalist production, which followed feudalism, is ideally based on the primary appreciation of science and its increasingly productive capacities, as a result of the application of an increasing supply of new technologies which are also increasingly adapted to broadening markets.  These may also support many more niche producers.

The earliest, most entrenched feudal powers are armies, trade and their related effort.

In Australian trading relations, banking, insurance, taxation, superannuation, sovereign and other investment funds are ideally financial drivers which should also offer protection for better production designed to serve broader groups of people.  This protective funding approach ideally includes support for injury prevention and rehabilitation strategies.  However, secret legal and financial expectations which arise from earlier feudal practice constantly drive all better production back.  Risk is traditionally conceptualised as purely commercial and then packaged and repeatedly sold on to many others as investment opportunities.  This practice in US housing was a primary driver of global financial crisis.

Gary Banks, the chairman of the Productivity Commission (PC) stated the evidence suggests that for productivity growth in future, Australia requires the following most:

1. Removal or reform of unproductive industry assistance
2. Removal of regulatory burdens and the avoidance of adding new ones and
3. Rethinking infrastructure

One could hardly disagree with the above.  It will be interesting to see what may make industry assistance productive or unproductive, when working beyond the confines of the normal organizational model of profit and loss.  For example, how important should one rate having a voice of comparatively informed and diverse reason, such as the Australian Financial Review, being available to every intelligent Australian at home and at work?  Like having the ABC and SBS TV and related radio opportunities, I’d rate it very highly.

I have just come back from the US.  It does not have a strong, free, reliable information core, which scares me.  Whatever economists say on productive or unproductive labour, it seems idiotic to prefer employment of thousands of narrowly driven policy-advising semi-morons, to broad and increasingly informed, linked and independent voices like SBS and related news, etc.  (Did I say how sad I was when Peter Ruehl passed over?  How unkind.)

According to Robert Guy (AFR 13.9.11, p.14), Beijing’s plan is to transform the economy over the course of the 12^th Five-Year Plan from a reliance on fixed-asset investments and exports to one based on consumption.  Suggested policies for growth of China’s middle-class consumers include an expansion of social welfare – (‘to mitigate precautionary savings’, according to Guy) and higher taxes on the rich and state-owned enterprises.  On the assumption that what is good for China should be good for everybody, and if it isn’t then we all want to know why, Australia should approach the Chinese government and seek to openly mesh our directions to global mutual advantage – this time with the monkeys and their furry friends openly in on the deals, big-time.  Stiglitz (2010) and our apparently necessary response to problems he outlines is discussed in this context later.

Necessary change for more productive and greener direction and jobs can be partly supported through open dissemination of information about jobs and quality curricula to achieve planned new greener directions locally, regionally and globally.  As well as development of skills to meet specific shortages, many open education models to assist community and industry management to achieve sustainable development are necessary. This submission therefore primarily addresses:

1. The planned investment directions necessary for more jobs and greener futures

1. The need for more on the job training and certification of competency to practice

1. The need for more clear, reliable, information, news, education, advertising and entertainment for open delivery by mass media to assist regional development

1. The need to ask regional employers what their job and skill requirements are in the light of commitments to regional development plans and to assist many greener project management directions and projects

1. The need for higher education institutions to support these directions better instead of being driven by older feudal associations which are mainly either market or government driven, but never effectively coordinated in the broader public interest

When the global financial crisis happened in 2008 the Australian government acted very quickly to give a lot of people a useful monetary hand-out to spend at Christmas and to subsidize school building and home roof insulation.  The media did an audit.  We learned a bit.  As a former public servant I bet the loss of life, fires and instances of corruption in the home insulation scheme partly occurred because the industry successfully urged that fast job protection was the paramount concern and that training for safety, etc. should be left to the usual slow, narrow and opaque classroom channels.  A clear video on key issues, given away by any newspaper, might have upset teachers throughout Australia.  The public might easily want to connect many more such skill demonstrations, inconveniently from teaching perspectives.   How long will it take to produce the requisite green skills at normal teaching rates – forever?  People working at Lake Cargelligo or environs should not have to go to Orange to learn green skills.  It is too hard and costly.

Unless the multiple, closed academic, teaching and related professional and bureaucratic strangleholds on education delivery are broken by inviting current or past teachers and suitably qualified others to contribute to relevant curriculum which is openly accessible to all, Australia will remain far less fair and competitive than it would otherwise be.  In races which depend upon delivering economies of scale, the US and Asia will flatten Australian production in many areas of English speaking services and manufacturing.

Australia’s economic hope appears to lie mainly in continuing to do what Australians have done well, which includes initiating and assisting many more fairly paternalistic forms of democracy through related jobs and projects aimed at public interest based goals.  Many European or Asian nations and organizations also appear well placed to be tugs to turn larger interests around which have historically served feudal, pre-scientific and anti-democratic ends.  Superannuation and related investments are discussed later.

The PC noted the decision in 2009 to abolish the Land and Water Australia research and development corporation (RDC).  It sought a new RDC entitled Rural Research Australia intended to sponsor non-industry specific research and development to promote more productive, sustainable resource use by the Australian rural sector.   In 2009, the total operating revenues of 39 Australian universities were $20.5 billion yet they only had one million students.  Academics may like their secret research processes but the key stakeholders who pay for it should ask for the cross-subsidised books to be opened to assist planned regional development which includes more access to education and related service via internet, radio or TV and in other suitable forms, which support work better.

The planned investment directions necessary for more jobs and greener futures

Stiglitz (2010), one of a huge number of Nobel prize-winning US economists, argued there has been so much success in labour saving production in much of the world that there is a problem of persistent unemployment and insufficient demand, dealt with poorly through encouraging personal or government debt until a new crisis.   A new global vision ideally puts less emphasis on generating demand for more material goods by those already over consuming and spending.  It requires shift in the collective direction of investment towards saving natural resources and protecting environments – the factors of production and quality of life the market does not value or undervalues.  Better cooperation between Australia, China, the US and other nations, organizations and individuals should deliver projects to achieve better quality of life, ideally designed in many related regional contexts, starting with the poorest.  Past regulation makes this very difficult to do and getting over this problem openly is very important for educating and offering people better options.

China may become a more democratic world leader, or could become much more like the US or India – increasingly unequal and driven by international markets, while consumers are driven by rubbish on foreign or home grown TV, to become fatter and more disabled and violent and/or more obsessed about their health, appearance and status.  Chinese government may ‘seek to mitigate precautionary savings’ or assist their more effective management in broader public and individual interests also serving future generations.   JK Galbraith hated seeing private affluence and public squalor.  It seems the US people’s abhorrence of the latter is a key factor driving them into always deeper debt. Australian planning direction is discussed later in this broader regional and international context in which all land, water and production are ideally better managed in the public interest.

As a historic desert mining town, which may draw support from many Australian and overseas directions in mines safety, health, transport and education, Broken Hill appears well positioned as a potential research trial to assist project ventures locally and globally.

For example, take the Broken Hill Community Foundation (BHCF), which received seed funding from Pasminco, with the funds to be capital protected, expanded and invested to provide financial support for local development projects.  The core values which drive the BHCF are that at all times it strives to be:

Open and transparent; Independent; Apolitical; Responsible; Non-bureaucratic;

Proactive and passionate; Community spirited.

This direction is hard, where those who ideally have no wrongdoing to hide are happy to have their matters discussed clearly in the open, in the knowledge that criticism and self-criticism are the leadership duty we bear in the search for truth, so all life may flourish.

However, as we must depend on the US, the Chinese, and other muscle it seems by far the safest option.  (One was not born female to live in this era and country for nothing.)

Political leaders ideally assist many broadly informed and protective decisions by key regional groups and related communities about development and distribution of wealth which depends on its creation and spread through work and related exchanges like borrowing and investment.  Australians should use many funds to develop Australia and plan with many globally and locally to develop in greener, more sustainable regional directions through creating jobs to improve the quality of life as broadly as possible.  The alternative is to continue seeking increasingly unstable profits in opaque and costly markets, before experiencing losses of the kind which led to the global financial crisis in late 2008.  This will inevitably happen again if Americans cannot understand what to do about much wrong direction, let alone muster the muscle to do it.  In ‘World crisis requires global solution’, former British PM Gordon Brown sensibly called on the world to establish a new financial regime and on the G20 to deliver it. (AFR, 13.9.11, p.63)

According to the AFR (12.10.11), the day the Clean Energy Future bill was passed was Magic Pudding Day (my un-birthday).  The Sydney Morning Herald (SHM 13.10.11, p 1) states a carbon price will start mid 2012, rising by 5% per year until converting to a price set by an emissions trading market three years later.  The carbon tax starts at $23 per tonne and will be paid by 500 biggest polluters.  I have not read the bill but we should.  Whenever the moneyed or injured are unhappy about something, the law will be all that is left to lead lawyers and their multiple courts, to which public servants also defer on a daily basis, while politicians come and go, their debates forgotten.  People need to understand more about how the system operates on us, not merely keep mouthing many comparatively narrow and ignorant views from more narrowly particular interests.

(Come back Australia Post.  All is forgiven.  I was a fool.  We can do this thing together.)

Anyhow, according to the AFR, the Business Council of Australia wants infrastructure addressed.  Government and regional communities should identify clear, openly applied regional development directions and related projects, jobs and skills to support regional telecommunication directions.  Current government review seeks to address opportunities that the National Broadband Network (NBN) creates for the emerging digital economy to improve the delivery of health and education outcomes; growth in local economies; business efficiencies and opportunities; and government services and programs, including local government services.  Related directions are addressed later and in the attached.

In this regional development context attention is also drawn to the current Inquiry into Workforce and Education Participation undertaken by the Economic and Finance Committee of the Parliament of South Australia.  Among other things, it seeks ‘ways to enhance access to and participation in education, training and employment, including through improved collaboration between government, health, community, education, training, employment and other services’.  It also seeks strategies to respond to the needs of people with limited experience of participation in education and/or the workforce.

In his new role leading an emerging infrastructure research group, former treasurer, Ken Henry, apparently plans to push for ‘authoritative work’ with the University of Wollongong’s Simulation, Modelling, Analysis, Research and Teaching (SMART) group in regard to project financing for big ticket items like high speed rail.  Ideally we can all learn a lot from an open exercise.  Henry said it is important to make at least some of these investments more attractive to superannuation funds.  He said he took on the SMART job because he finds the challenge of developing Australia’s infrastructure deeply fascinating.  I do too.  History repeatedly shows it is vital to understand how to structure investments in order to avoid being wiped out by them a little down the track.

Henry thinks there is an enormous need to build ‘more of just about everything’.  Some men tend to have comparatively one track minds.  If they are not building things they are blowing them up.  I strongly share Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s view that ideally we are over plonking buildings in parks.  MP Bob Katter said on the ‘Insiders’ on ABC TV that he feared plans for systems that are supposed to reduce carbon pollution would involve ‘complex rubbish that is going to distress everybody in Australia’.  The memory and effects of the global financial crisis and of the Americans who mainly brought it to us, has not dimmed, at least for him and me, in spite of the view of life peddled by Paul Sheard,  global chief economist at Nomura, etc.  In a line-up of Europe, Russia, China and Mongolia, I rate Australian trains by far the most likely to be running late and the taxi costs also as highest.  I sure wouldn’t ever want to visit here without a cheap group package.  Transport around Broken Hill appears a related unrealised opportunity.

What about solar powered transport?  China has a lot for tourists.  Why not try some out?

Many global communities find it hard to emerge from the most recent financial crisis.  It will also be hard to avoid repetition of old cycles where the next crash is bigger and much more rare life and beauty have been trashed.  People everywhere love water but are faced with increasing desert and have to buy water in plastic which then destroys marine life and clogs the earth.  The Menindee Wetlands Project, near Broken Hill, is ideally a laboratory with wider influences, like a sanctuary or zoo.  Wetlands provide habitat for animals and plants and may contain a wide diversity of life, supporting plants and animals found nowhere else.  Wetlands provide an important range of environmental, social and economic services.  Many are areas of great natural beauty and many are important to Aboriginal people.  Wetlands also provide many benefits for industry.  They form nurseries for fish and other freshwater and marine life and are critical to Australia’s commercial and recreational fishing industries. Wetlands are the vital link between land and water.  Many birds of all kinds also love them, along with trees. You get the picture.

The Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at Sydney Uni. recently held a Research Symposium entitled Resilience: Can our Environment keep bouncing back?  Michael Harris referred to a simple investment framework for environmental resources and a related tool for planning and prioritizing public investments in natural resources and the environment called INFFER.  This requires decision makers to be explicit in their assumptions and to start planning with regional maps in which significant public assets are ideally identified and simply graded in terms of their high or low significance and related threat, prior to making recommendations for action to improve their nature and resilience.  Harris used the regional framework to address benefits and threats to private activity, as well as public benefits and threats, related to natural environments.

This is ideally a clear, simple and flexible process, based on gathering evidence, and debating it, rather than a rigidly rule driven one.  However, clear distinctions between stakeholders and key stakeholders are crucial for good project management.  The former are all those who have an interest of any kind in the project.  The key stakeholders are those for whom the proposed project benefits are ideally designed on one hand and those who fund the project on the other.  A stakeholder management model contrasts with a stockholder management model.  The latter traditional market model addresses only the financial interests of investors in a project, (assuming they happen to be lucky).  It does not address whether any other social or environmental goals of the project are achieved.

Getting investment clearly directed to achieving social and environmental goals sought by the key stakeholders is important for designing and thus comparing the outcomes of stakeholder services to meet goals better for current and future generations.   Project management requires:

1. Consultative development of clear program and related project aims and objectives (with or without numerical targets)

2. Clear strategies to achieve the program aims and the related project objectives, including those for clear management accountability and dispute resolution

3. The provision of the budgets necessary to undertake the program and its project/s

4. Monitoring of project performance and evaluation of the outcomes

5. Clear accountabilities for program and project management and expenditure

In this openly partnered development context, the NSW Office of Fair Trading Home Building Contract is a clear, informative and helpful product which is easily copied or adapted for teaching basic principles of quality management on the job. The contract ideally has clear key aims and must be clearly filled in for quality management.  Ideally it ensures work quality generates periodic work payments.  Related accreditation of skills developed on the job may be openly recorded and signed-off clearly.

In Australia, industry superannuation funds are non-profit retirement funds ideally managed for the benefit of members.  The contributions put into superannuation funds throughout working life are ideally augmented by other savings, insurance, taxation or related investment pools which support ventures managed as openly and effectively as possible.  As Jeremy Cooper, the chief architect of a new stage of this investment regime designed to protect retirement funds and reduce their costs pointed out, Australia and many OECD nations, like the US and the UK, unfortunately tend to view superannuation as being another part of the financial services industry.  The Australian superannuation system is very good by international comparisons, but Cooper said Denmark and the Netherlands have better models (AFR, 10.10.11, p. 1).  Guys in the know are apt to forget their job is to make the problems more explicit so we can understand and deal with them.

(In the US I find I am driven into constant frenzy by their obscuring financial metaphors.)

As an earlier Australian superannuation architect, Garry Weaven, pointed out in the recent AFR Magazine, The Power Issue:

Superannuation, essentially, is a means to administer and invest savings to allow ordinary working people to emulate the advantages of the very wealthy; they don’t have to sell when markets are bad, no deal is too big, the best advice is affordable, unit costs are minimised.

Weaven attacked the financial services industry, which underpins nearly all other industry, as being one that can be paid for matching benchmarks while actual retirement savings decline; for taking commissions without adding value; and for undermining not enhancing the savings needs of the country.  The financial or legal ‘service providers’ are actually the controllers, who take money from pools by managing them for themselves on a daily basis.  Many in Britain and the European Union suggested a Tobin Tax to discourage the constant activities of money managers who clip the funds each time they move the investments.

Weaven states reform of the system of advice and distribution of superannuation and other financial schemes depends on grasping the simple idea that, if advice is only in the best interests of the client, that would also be likely to be in the interests of maximising long term national savings.  On the other hand, if advice is based on sales commissions, it will be conflicted and result in the promotion of underperforming funds.  With a perspicacity which has surely been shared by many ignorant girls everywhere, at least before the age of puberty, Weaven states:

‘If one can align one’s ambitions and commercial aspirations with the long-term public interest that is not only an extremely potent business strategy but a personally satisfying lifestyle’

The ideal management and work practices for ‘democracy’ or ‘liberal democracy’ require consideration in many contexts where practice is typically feudal or tribal. Could the US, for example, be considered as an enviable democracy when the rich can secretly provide the major funds for the campaigns of all politicians and the people are not strongly discouraged from the belief that guns keep them safe, although the nation has by far the highest murder rate in the OECD and major injuries and deaths from constant war? US

TV is ubiquitous, not like college education, and promotes more ignorant consumption.

The global financial crisis showed that many ruling financial, legal and political assumptions, which also require and privilege commercial in confidence behaviour, serve citizens poorly.  For example, compared with many other OECD countries, US citizens now have poorer health, inadequate and more expensive health care, huge and widening income differentials, lower minimum wages, fewer paid holidays, higher education costs, more unstable employment, lost jobs, lost savings, huge government and personal debts, major homelessness and deaths and injuries from constant violence.  Wherever it counts most, their principles appear feudal, not more scientific or democratic.  One assumes this naturally also determines what is considered profitable expenditure and who decides it.

The horror of the 20^th century and its constant global and regional hot and cold wars and their aftermath can be seen as the utter failure of feudal diplomacy and market logic, which are now indisputably global.  The idea that many male leaders protected civilians, especially women and children, is a bitter joke.  On behalf of many who lived or studied in the 20^th century and beyond, one cannot strongly enough express one’s contempt for many stupid values and directions expressed in male, feudal leadership.  We came to Australia in the 1950s as my father wanted us to get as far away as possible from this global and regional leadership by lunatics, before their next atomic war.  He was happy he was not dead from the TB the last had given him.  This story matters.  Will it be told?  Not by many and not widely, especially in Asia, I guess.  Will most now get only the view suitable for Mickey Mouse?   Educating people is ideally preferred to forcing them into competitive educational debt.  The latter is one of many US fashions shipped to us.

Australian experience has shown that insurance underwriting for illness and disability which is provided in the private sector, typically leads to repeated disaster and loss for many, as insurers compete for business on premium price.  At the same time as undertaking fierce premium price competition, insurers may suffer losses through disasters in parts of the world over which they have no direct control, which eventually may bring down the business.  This occurs after years spent with lawyers and courts, which provide in-effective risk management but take huge amounts of money.

Competition in the regional insurance system is best achieved when industry and government openly own the funds and use private sector insurers or others to administer injury prevention, rehabilitation and investment services and provide top-up insurance.

For example, Australian Medicare is a monopoly pricing system designed to ensure that insurance companies, hospitals and doctors cannot drive the cost of health care services as high as they would otherwise drive them if the Australian population had no guaranteed access to free or lower cost services under Medicare.  In the US people die earlier and US health care services are more expensive and less equitable than those here.  Many with chronic illnesses are denied treatment on the basis of having ‘pre-existing conditions’ and more than 40 million have no insurance coverage. Think of the cost-shifting paper work.

Australia should not stand by and watch the Chinese revolutionary experience and related understanding wasted.  Chinese energy is astounding and its capacity for planning and implementing greener and fairer direction globally would be enhanced by more open associations with all who seek more open, green and fairer direction.  What exactly is Chevron doing about this direction which it claims on TV to lead?  Ministers like Martin Ferguson, Greg Combet, Kevin Rudd and other key communications organizations like the US PBS News Hour, SBS, ABC, etc. should bring and seek more open and clearer leadership more broadly, as recommended in later and attached discussion.  Support the PC on rural research and development directions as this can lead in new Australian and international government and community directions which ideally attempt to gain more sustainable regional development through better related investment and risk management.

Recently, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Kevin Rudd, (wild cheering), said to departmental officers:

We must never content ourselves with being the world’s best describers of unfolding challenges.  We are at our best when we go to the next and necessary step of determining what we must then do in anticipation of the challenges.

This is also the vital first part of any quality management process.  It involves being able to understand environments so as to identify and prioritize the risks or challenges arising from them, in order to give advice to selected decision makers on the steps towards better management in the service of the people, including any of us who may be a bit special.

The Minister addressed the importance of aid effectiveness with the Australian Council for International Development.  He pointed to the centrality of Millennium Development Goals in the government mission and to the fact that that their focus is poverty reduction.  He also said part of the government mission is ‘giving voice to the voiceless’.  Openly planned development relationships, undertaken by high quality news and entertainment media owners, education and research institutions and governments are vital for effective community developments which value and protect heritage as well as directing related investment towards greener and more protectively democratic futures.  Many exquisite Japanese temples, shrines and gardens, supported by UNESCO, may also show the way.

Throughout the world, ‘corruption’ may often be most easily understood as carriage of the duty to older tribal and feudal ties, where men are typically expected to care for their brethren and all the related family expansions first and foremost. Confusions between earlier feudal or tribal duties to brethren and newer scientific and democratic duties to broader regional communities are embedded in many unjustified secret practices.  These have also been driven by generations of ruling financial, legal and bureaucratic interests, ideally cheered on at home by wives and kids.  Many global developments also led to increasing recognition in the dominant regional kinship networks and their bankers, of the existence of hopes and struggles by many outside their collegiate and marital associations.

In this context all ideally focus on open demonstration and attempted resolution of many related problems on the ground, not just on reporting political contest as an exciting sport.

The concept of aggregative democracy may be compared with deliberative democracy.  List argues the latter assumes the combination of belief and the desire to make rational decisions ideally drives development directions, rather than the aggregation of particular numbers being the main driver.  Deliberative democracy is necessary to protect the interests of future generations from destruction at the financial hands of past and current powerfully driving sectional interests.  List’s distinction between these two democratic forms also provides the capacity for all belief and more broadly scientific approaches to evidence to drive development regionally or universally. The rights and duties of individuals in regard to self-determination are also jealously preserved in this ideal process in which greater individual freedom is also a more logically possible goal.

Ideally, regional directions seek more jobs and innovation on the job to assist protection of the cultural and environmental heritage for future generations.  Carbon pollution reduction and related regional planning directions ideally underpin project investment to improve many related rural and urban regions.  Effective land and water management and related community transport, housing, health and education services ideally support greener services which also drive manufacturing and which ideally are also planned, established and tested in Australian/Chinese/US/European or related open partnerships.

The best way to identify the skill needs of any Australian industry sector and to create the situation that allows for the best match between skills and job opportunities is to tailor more opportunities for key on-the-job learning and for related curriculum and accreditation which is provided as openly, flexibly and cheaply as possible to ensure its relevance and quality for associated business and community actions, which also lead to greener futures.  This is ideally a global opportunity for as many people as possible who want to understand more about good management and/or to learn related skills.

The potential to save and develop in useful ways often seems huge to me.  Invite me on a razor gang.  For example, Tokyo residents, who appear to have few green spaces to enjoy other than Ueno Park, also live in a city coloured green on the map by vast expanses of expensive real estate where foreign diplomatic staff live in luxury.  Ueno Park appears to have been increasingly concreted over to keep the construction industry in work.  Large groups of unemployed men also spend each night in Ueno Park under blue plastic sheeting.  One wonders if African or other leaders of poor countries know or care how expensive their Tokyo diplomatic service is.  The money would seem better spent if diplomatic staff were located closer to each other, preferably living in the same building, like a university college, where they could also talk to each other more easily and cheaply like productive colleagues on a daily basis in a tearoom – photograph and film events.

(There is nothing worse than seeing journalists talking to each other?)

The need for more on the job training and certification of competency to practice

The attached submissions on the PC draft research report ‘Vocational Education and Training (VET) Workforce (2010)’ argue that aboriginal people and many others from lower socio-economic backgrounds will only gain more equal higher education access and outcomes if there is also more recognised training on the job and related certification of competency to practice, delivered and recorded in regional fields. Ideally, all assessments are related to clearly specified project outcomes and environments and to the openly related aims and concrete outcomes of openly coordinated practice.  As Gunter Pauli pointed out, greener practice is often much cheaper and people have long been taught to associate more sustainable practice with poverty – learn more about wood and bamboo.

More education delivered on the job and clear recording and accreditation of the concrete outcomes of performance are necessary for more productive and fairer education but universities increasingly travel in the opposite direction.  They are often set up to lengthen the student’s costly and theoretical engagement with academic subjects, on the promise they will find a good job more easily than the person who did not hand over the money.  This rots the capacity of societies to use the strengths of all to best and fairest advantage.

While testing comparative competence in reading and mathematics at school appears very important, the charge of rote ‘teaching to the test’ is far more relevant in higher education, as so much testing is by multiple-choice examination.  Computers often do the marking and so release academics from an enormous amount of work in marking, commenting on and debating student projects.  The world of work often requires people who work well with machines and related key technologies on one hand, and people who write and communicate clearly and analytically well on the other.  Those of us better on one hand, are seldom better on another.  The multiple choice test reveals few such competencies.  The content is often trivially general and soon forgotten.  Students and academics do not complain as most seek delivery of the relevant certificate with as little input as possible.

From the broader community perspective, open educational content to achieve clear course aims is ideally accompanied by more productive projects and related open assessments, so many more in related communities learn better at work.  See some key examples of assessments to achieve such goals on www.Carolodonnell.com.au.  In this way more project marking jobs ideally are also provided for post-graduate students who would also get a better education from students and their diverse real life employers, as I did.

Communication technologies should support better operational methods of giving good quality services.  This is different from the constant repetition of long and often dubious questionnaires to students and other community members, posing as consultation, research or evaluation.  It is very quick and cheap to put thousands of questionnaires through a computer.  However, in the absence of the potential for open consideration of academic or other work product in practice rather than theory, by all with an interest in gaining from it, such opinion seeking may be unproductive garbage in and out.  The judgment of anything is likely to be fairest and also most productive when undertaken consultatively in the open, especially in areas where the quality of the judgment must reasonably be in the eyes of the beholder, as distinct from tested in expert practice to lead to improved technological development.  In education this is ideally developed on screen and through related journalistic, pictorial and technological effort.

It appears axiomatic to teachers and in construction that money spent in students travelling to nest near well endowed or refurbished educational institutions with many huge and small lecture rooms, libraries and offices is money well spent, especially in bigger cities.  To benefit many more, however, the clear and inviting presence of paid work, on the job skills development, cheap housing and cheap transport must also be designed and delivered in ways that are organized and attractive enough to improve the chances of many more green and productive exchanges than currently occur.   Better coordinated work, training, housing, communication and transport are also necessary to enable the broad, close and critical relationships between theory and practice that are vital for greener and more inclusive forms of production.

Broadly planned regional rather than professional development approaches are necessary to benefit all regional communities.  Access to higher education, work and all their related outcomes should not be theoretically constructed as if education is ideally a particular course of competitively blinkered races, where all eventually have a right to the professional tops of many narrowly and theoretically designed and professionally driven education, job, career and income silos.  Cutting a broader regional reality up to avoid or drive it narrowly through many professionally distant glasses appears fraudulent and stupid from many broader regional interests in better and fairer development.  Australia needs more open, practical workers, not more lawyers and their feudally, commercially and bureaucratically related theoretical peddlers and boundary keepers, aboriginal or not.

A lot of things that seem clear quite quickly to Blind Freddy may seem subjects of great mystery after costly economic experts.  Never pay for what you cannot explain clearly.

Advance health, which ideally depends on exercises for play or work or good preparation for death and on greener and healthier regions.  Start internationally with the poorest.

In comparative terms the poor are increasingly disadvantaged in global and local races driven by the financial and theoretical interests of the traditional professional and academic service providers.  The comparatively few individuals from poorer backgrounds who gain access to and ‘make it’ in their research and education institutions often join a brain drain away from where new skills are most needed and also increase the problems of regional inequality which were supposed to be reduced.  Academics do not complain.

The more one thinks and learns about one’s practice, the more notions of skill and education become more similar.  However, the term ‘skill’ is usually applied to comparatively repeated engagement with specific technologies, to achieve some expected concrete results, as distinct from living in broader theoretical realms, related or not.  From this perspective, the logical person to become a dentist would be the woman who stands by his chair and helps him out all day, every day with every different patient.  She could get knowledge to deepen her understanding and capacity in tooth-craft from others, while earning a living to care for her children.  However, professionals often resist the obvious.  This was the case, for example, when academics organized a recent Sydney Teaching Colloquium at Sydney Uni.  Having read their poster on the future of dentistry, I have no idea what they want to do and how, but you can bet they don’t want it to hurt them.

Instead of requiring Certificate IV in Training and Assessment for the VET workforce, the capacity to openly demonstrate specified industry skills and related key quality and risk management requirements of law and contract are ideally demonstrated in practice.  The submission from TVET Australia states practitioners require three sets of skills in VET – ‘currency of industry knowledge, adult learning capabilities and integration of technology into learning’.  However, there is very good reason to be highly sceptical that the Certificate IV sets good practical direction for effective and cheap skill development. Instead it appears to sharply narrow the field of available teachers, as discussed in the attached.  This is the old and true construction industry complaint at a higher level – the youth who may work hardest and best in the field are often not very good with books and written examinations.  The reverse is often also true but hidden to maintain social status.

Instead of requiring the Certificate IV, openly, honestly and directly appraise the performance of people claiming they have current industry knowledge to teach and an ability to communicate the related information (directly via computer if this is ideally the best form of curriculum delivery, discussed attached).  The NSW Office of Fair Trading Home Building Contract is a clear and helpful product which is easily copied or adapted for teaching principles of quality management on the job and for testing and accrediting related capacities in practice.  The alternative route of requiring teachers to have the Certificate IV is merely to narrow the available pool of teachers, using very poor criteria to do it.  It is the complete reverse of the ideally required practical direction – yet again.

The need for more clear, reliable, information, news, education, advertising and entertainment for open delivery by mass media to assist regional development

Australians should take and foster more openly and broadly planned and coordinated organizational approaches to news, education and all related product and service delivery, as they appear suited to particular or broader regional industry and community contexts and interests.  The ideal of the media as the ‘fourth estate’, which ideally shows and represents the interests of all the people, is contrasted with earlier feudal and legal views of justice as necessarily being delivered in wars of words, conducted expensively by lawyers and all who increasingly hang on legally driving commercial, bureaucratic and professional force.  If broadly and openly planned service directions which are regionally, rather than professionally driven are allowed to occur, Australians and others can also benefit from the necessary reconnection of practice and theory which professionals have increasingly undermined due to their narrower theoretical and related financial interests.

There was an almost total lack of prediction of global financial crisis in 2008, especially in the US, where one might reasonably have expected it.  I have come from a holiday in New York, where nearly all ‘news’ is daily market and comparatively personal trivia, linked by food, drug, financial product and other advertising, if one can judge by more than 27 stations in my hotel.   Aside from PBS News Hour, hardly anyone on US TV appeared to take any interest in or know anything much about anywhere outside the US.  They appear to like to fly blind while praising prices and their soldiers’ actions.  They think their guns keep them safe but have by far the highest murder rate in the OECD.  When they speak about elsewhere they usually are shrilly making the primary point, which is the US market system is best, even if US government naturally stinks on all sides but mostly in Washington which should fix the mess.  How could they not just repeat it?

By selling food, entertainment and drugs, mass media is a key part of the learning upon which we embark to enrich ourselves or to be destroyed by war and all related disorders.  Ideally, media provides for the safe expression of emotion so broader learning and judgment are achieved increasingly by all, as distinct from by the gun or lawyers following narrow dictates unsuitable to the particular situation. From the consumer and related community perspectives, including in relation to media services, the primary issue of concern appears not to be how many providers operate in markets but the quality of their product or service and its outcomes.  Service proliferation of itself is not necessarily helpful and may generally undermine the quality of service, rather than improving it.  This was a lesson learned in Australian workers compensation when it was shown that too many insurers in a market led to repeated failures as insurers competed on premium price, while feuding lawyers generated increasing court costs upon the premium pool.

As an English speaking country with a small population unable to deliver comparative economies of production scale, Australia is always in danger of being totally swamped by US-following suit.  This is scary as our news media is far better than theirs, with the exception of the great PBS News Hour, which has to rely on public donation.  All communities need more clear and reliable information and news, education, advertising and entertainment, or are more likely to be intellectually lost and easily manipulated by narrower commercial or professional interests.  Since clans and societies have progressed from killing each other towards duelling lawyers and beyond, one sees peace and all qualities that may go with it increasingly rest on good communication and that all are primitive communicators in one way or another.  Try to make it better instead of worse.

There must be more planning and execution for personal and other product and service development, by more open collaboration outside, rather than inside circles full of comparatively like-minded professional colleagues, where disciplines may delight in complicating many narrowly distorted, legally and theoretically driven views.  One gain of working in the public service rather than a university is at least being in daily work contact with those with skills unlike, rather than like oneself.  This is usually more useful.

Historically, the ‘vocational education’ sector has been built around manufacturing and related job apprenticeship but universities have been built around the higher professional interests of service providers in medicine, law, engineering, architecture, etc.  Those most concerned about the importance of manufacturing industry development use assumptions and economic models which ignore the vital potential power in services such as health and community care or land and water management to drive manufacturing development.

Instead the growth of many new service institutions also appear increasingly to be driven by encouragement of comparatively unproductive paper work which offers itself as consultation, potential funding application, research, fund-raising or charitable begging.  Surely stable public and private sector development can be planned more effectively than this.  (My South American World Vision child, one of six kids, also looks fat – so what?)

As economist Steve Keen pointed out in the article ‘It’s time to put money into the equation’, orthodox economic models of how the economy works do not incorporate money and debt (SMH 26.9.11, Business p. 3.) The George Soros Institute for New Economic Thinking has kindly given Steve $125,000 to make a model to fix this starting with bank loans.  However, Steve is also the man who predicted Australian house prices would lose 40% in value in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.  At the time I was still ringing my hands with glee that I’d put some pre-retirement money into helping my daughter buy a flat, instead of into superannuation or anywhere else stupid the experts advised.  We must understand what men are doing with money and we definitely do not.

I speak as a comparatively wealthy retiree with nothing better to do than complain that institutions are not set up to deliver more stable, green investment and jobs but just the expensive lawyer driven same, assisted in the names of education, research and charity.    UniSuper lost $70,000 of mine when the 2008 financial crash occurred soon after I retired.  The most opaque and high risk of investments are often the ‘ethical’ ones.  On our body corporate I then experienced the lesser fear and costs engendered by some in the construction industry whose lawyers, supposedly concerned about safety, were perhaps trying to solve their clients much worse financial problems, including slow payment and severe debt default by bigger market players.  The direction normally led by US markets is comparatively easily entrenched in Australian universities as they aspire to be global institutions and often do so by hanging on many related US research coattails.

In past weeks, I received six long questionnaires from organizations. The national census made most sense as it did not ask for my almost totally ignorant and disengaged theoretical opinion on anything.  One of the questionnaires, from Macquarie Uni., asked my attitude to higher density development.  Whether higher density development is acceptable or not must surely depend on the project, the site and related environs. I fought freeways knocking down housing in Glebe; in favour of higher development for more green public space at Harold Park; and against the construction of a 3 storey boarding house in a poor spot in St James Lane.  I want some higher density in return for more green space and low cost housing.  The housing appears unlikely to happen, except for the wealthy and social security recipients.  Those working but struggling appear unlikely to afford it.  A questionnaire on height cannot deal with specific regional reality.

Two questionnaires from the City of Sydney Council asked what I want in Glebe (which probably has more services than anywhere in Australia).  For many years, I have sought more local parks, trees and green development along with most other Glebe residents.  What a very large demonstration of residents controlled by police and including trade union leaders, Commonwealth, state and local politicians, and I all want, is return of the Glebe Post Office, which always had queues to the counter, unlike nearly all shops in Glebe Pt Road.  Queues at Broadway PO, where many Sydney Uni PO matters are also referred, are so long that it always takes ages to reach the counter.  Customers often have very complex matters to be dealt with in Glebe as there are so many foreign students, other visitors or migrants or social security beneficiaries and related diverse businesses.  We all objected mightily but the PO closed anyway.  The system seems stupid but ABC Business Sunday showed that Australia Post has been comparatively good in gearing up to deliver parcels to any home cheaply, which is crucial for retail competition of all kids.

On our body corporate we want to know how illegal dumping and related waste can be managed better so it drives greener communities and jobs.  For many years, dumping has happened in our dead end street probably because those cleaning or renovating houses or getting rid of other household stuff do not want to spend the time and money to go to the dump. They dump it in parking areas near us at night instead.  Nobody knows who dumps it.  On my investigation for our body corporate on how rubbish dumping in our dead-end street might be avoided by greening some relevant pavement areas with planter boxes of native trees to discourage dumpers, Council public domain staff claimed such proposals could only be rejected according to regulations.  What ideally happens to old mattresses?

Business Sunday should turn to look at waste, as well as the NBN and Australia Post.

I have a long length of copper pipe since the plumbers last came.  Is it worth money?

One often feels many are increasingly being employed, either to raise expectations on one hand or to dash them on the other, rather than to enable any real understanding or effort.  Academics are among an increasing number of people who appear expected to spend time applying for small grants under such circumstances.  As a resident, I suggested an application to the NSW 2011 Community Building Partnership program about local parks, the proposed boarding house and rubbish in our street but one guesses from eleven years of working in academia that the money is likely to be earmarked for older unseen forces.  This seems far from the most productive way for so many people to spend time.

One of the benefits of more openly planned regional approaches by Fairfax press and other information sources would be the capacity for this to place many professional and bureaucratic drivers in more clear, broad, open and rational service contexts, to better engage and practically assist communities and businesses in related greener direction.

Ask regional employers what their skill needs are in the light of commitments to regional development plans and assist many related project management directions

Ask regional employers what their key skill needs are and help develop these skills openly in the context of production plans for practical green projects and jobs to benefit many linked communities.  This is discussed in relation to the implementation of the Far West NSW Regional Plan (2010-2011) in the attached. The plan seeks that information about investment barriers is ‘provided to government stakeholders’ as an aspect of proposing solutions for barriers to growth and facilitating the formation of trusting relationships between ‘new investors and prospective partners and suppliers’ (p. 7).  This information is vital so that both the elected representatives and those they serve have the financial and other knowledge to address their community and business directions better in future.  The information that businesses and communities give government is their collective property and in a democracy it should not be kept secretively by bureaucratic and legal forces.

Planning processes ideally begin internationally in consultation with the poorest people living in natural environments being turned into deserts or monocultures where much more biodiversity, heritage and culture may also be lost very soon.  It is vital that comparative rural and socio-economic disadvantage and data driven management to address this are tackled in the light of consideration of the most effective relationships between rural and urban life and between communication, higher education and research. The problems of the legal and financial paradigms Australians have inherited are that law is driven narrowly, by many feudally closed assumptions and practices, rather than in the administration of broader community aims and directions, recorded in the light of the particular circumstances of any case and its key community and environment links.

More openly planned directions are better than trying to be ‘fairer’ in many environments which privilege the already privileged, whose work is comparatively costly but may be of dubious use.  Devise more stable accounting and financial systems to protect and enhance diverse communities and related environments which ideally seek fair treatment.  Clear, open regional development aims, directions and accounting systems also appear as best protections against corruption and related problems.  Build project management, the right to expression, and all related direction in the open, so all can ideally see who provides money for any development, where it goes and why.  What people think or want and why, is ideally expressed in related contexts where individual interests are ideally understood and constructed in the light of shared interests in a broadening range of communities, starting with the poorest, including aborigines.  Think globally, act locally.

Institutional restructuring in universities

Universities spring from governance structures traditionally modeled on the notion that the university is a community of scholars, composed of smaller communities of scholars.  These scholars often shared the traditional feudal view that pursuit of their own interests is identical with pursuit of the interests of society.  Traditionally, academic management has supported ‘direct democracy’ rather than conceptualized the university as an ideally independent element in Australian society, which is based on representative democracy.

In my view, this has particularly confused the traditional Left of politics and aborigines.

A common problem is unwillingness to honestly look for and address economic interests.

The NSW Auditor-General’s Report to Parliament in May 2009 focused on the corporate governance of universities and large government agencies (p. 13).  It identified a number of issues of concern relating to universities, including:

• A combined operating loss of $66 million in 2008 compared to a surplus of $388 million in 2007, largely as a result of the global financial crisis and volatility in financial markets.
• An increase in unfunded superannuation liabilities to $3.1 billion
• Increased reliance on overseas students as a source of income, with overseas students now contributing nearly half of total student revenue.   (Why is this considered a problem for Australia?  The primary aim should be to increase income through open education and research and development partnerships locally and in other countries. See attached discussion on carbon pollution reduction and sustainable development in Singapore, China and elsewhere.  Suggestions are made to deal with related financial problems.)
• Financial exposure due to excessive annual leave balances of academic staff
• Significant maintenance backlogs of nearly $1 billion (p.13-14)

University governance aims or objectives and related support to attain them must also be designed to solve the above problems and achieve sustainable development. 

It would be highly desirable if the financial systems of the university were primarily designed to achieve social, environmental and supporting economic aims, rather than linked to supporting professional and related financial interests, as is the situation now.

UniSuper certainly appears to be developing in better investment directions since the global financial crisis.  It has $27.6 billion in funds under management and $4.7 billion in pension funds.  Its new top ten Australian and International Shareholdings now include Apple, Microsoft, Google; four Australian banks (not Macquarie thank God); Telstra, Westfield Group, Woolworths, BHP Billiton Ltd, Rio Tinto Ltd, Exxon Mobile Corporation etc.  This seems a good group of investment interests to assist the stable, open and innovative regional investment directions required to assist greener production.

Universities should invest in broader communication, in company with other broadly educational media, to meet the general need for greener and fairer development.  As a result of narrow collegiate interests, Australian universities usually appear most powerfully aligned with professional associations.  Approval of collegiate peers is traditionally put above the approval of all others and this has produced management structures composed of a multiplicity of theoretically driven academic silos, where little notice may be taken of those outside the academic discipline.  Many increasingly withdraw from debate for fear of stepping on each other’s patch.  Others help professionals often much like themselves in other bureaucracies, to multiply jargon and proliferate stifling red tape.  The nation bears the costs when it should be able to lead.

The VET sector requires consideration in related light of developments in universities, where students also seek careers in health, construction, education, environment protection and other areas vital for social, environmental and economic improvement.  At Sydney and other universities, for example, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) policy of seeking a fixed ratio between insecure and secure academic jobs hinders the growth of quality education.  This union policy compares unfavorably with the struggle of NSW nurses calling for more clearly defined ratios of nurses to patients, to promote higher quality of care.  An earlier submission which is attached made the following recommendations, among others, which ideally apply nationally:

1. Maximize student choice in regard to subjects they are allowed to undertake across the organization

2. Categorize all student subject choice as being principally related to either Governance or Health or Built and Natural Environments

3. Allocate staff rationally in terms of their teaching, research or related work contributions to one or more of the above areas so student choice and administrative efficiencies are maximized

4. Attack the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) policy of a fixed ratio between insecure and secure academic jobs and all related policies which hinder cheaper, better education, organizational growth and sustainable development

5. Make managers manage rationally to grow the business and to cheapen and improve the quality of education and research for more sustainable development

6. Put subject content on-line and administer subjects to maximize economies of teaching and related administrative scale and jobs for PG students and others

Open education and maximising student choice are vital to encourage more students to enter more easily into all areas where there are skill shortages, as well as being necessary to produce greener development effectively, rather than reproducing past assumptions and practices, plus the invention of newer buzz words.  The alternative direction is consistent with the current PC recommendation that technical and further education institutes should be able to select the mix of employment arrangements, supported by the contemporary human resource management practices that best suit their business goals.  Open them up.

The NTEU is the enemy of students, communities and better institutions, as it fights economies of management and teaching scale which would provide cheaper, more open and better educations.  The most obvious and best way to organize work is often for a single lecturer to define and control subject content, which is on-line as well as delivered in lectures.  She should undertake quality control in relation to post-graduate tutors who also do the work of marking projects devised for consultative undertaking in work and related community situations.  The post-graduate student tutor will generally be expected to have passed the related UG subject, but is naturally free to take clear issue with the views of the lecturer.  This assists debate and learning by all.

The NTEU policy of a ratio between insecure and secure jobs prevents management flexibility and the capacity to grow the business.  For example, I would have liked to be in a position to attract as many as possible overseas students to do my subjects because they wanted or needed to, instead of having students with little interest in the area forced to pay for them as part of a required course.  However, if lecturers have to do all their own marking this always increases the pressure for multiple choice exams, which are often very inadequate forms of evaluation.  In the traditional academic model lecturers like to have as few students as possible, or else multiple choice tests, with more time for research.  The organization of on-line education may be multi-skilled in the sense that the lecturer contacts all students herself, but is often intellectually and administratively crazy.

An Open University (OU) approach to education seems a good way forward.  An OU meeting I attended in Milton Keynes in England (29.5.08) first stressed the importance of quality, access and scale in OU curriculum production and dissemination.  The reason for the establishment of the OU was to make higher education available to many more people through TV, videos, the internet and books.  All registered OU students have access to an approved tutor – local or online.  All education provision should aim to be in line with commitment to open, affordable, accessible, flexible, high quality, greener, fairer services.

Nevertheless, when all else fails, take a leaf from Alan Stokes, in ‘Adrift on a sea of gloom and loving it’, who gives himself cognitive behaviour therapy for depression and is thus able to say:

I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s job figures revealing 94.7 percent employment – much better than global average.  We’re all very capable of pulling through, we’ve done it before.  The sky’s blue, the water’s beautiful and the roos are jumping.  And I can just remember how great it was on the dole –surfing every day and partying every night.  (AFR, 12.10.11, p.59)

I’ve never been on the dole but find I can certainly identify strongly with the sentiments.  On the other hand, I guess quite a few European Jews and others said that kind of thing before WW2.  Can anyone in the US still remember that?  Jesus, I hope so.  I’m sick of the Hitler repeats.  Have a go at doing something about it.  Help a lot more make movies.

I will address death and entertainment next, although not necessarily in that order.

Cheers

Carol O’Donnell, St James Court, 10/11 Rosebank St., Glebe, Sydney 2037

a.k.a  Lilith the Magic Pudding, Chief Alternative to Faith.

This link is to my new CD titled HOPE:

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/100258

The CD contains six melodies that I have composed and recorded on my piano keyboard which is attached to my computer and simulates orchestral sounds.  It is dedicated to the memory of the famous writer and movie director Anthony Minghella who’s art and work was inspirational to me. I have never met this man, but I wish that I did. Today I watch his movies, I watch his uTube interviews and I read about his work and I find it all inspirational.

The songs can be downloaded free of charge. It is a gift from me to anyone who wants to listen to these songs. It is not an overproduced CD given that I recorded the whole album in less than 3 hours. But sometimes spontaneous music is much better than overproduced music especially if it comes from the heart.

I hope that you will enjoy listening to these melodies and that you will download them.

Alfredo Zotti

This is a poem which was written by a very creative listener, Barbara, on Jamendo. Her username on Jamendo is Wolfsong the Poet:

Music for starlight

Dr Robert Rich is a psychologist who has helped me to understand that having a bipolar 2 disorder is not as bad as our society would have us believe.

The disorder is there, and it will probably be with me for the rest of my life, but it need not stop me for living a fulfilling life. There will always be days where I will feel depressed or manic but with a bit of effort I can control these moods and ensure that things don’t get out of hand.

How can I do this? I can do this by using mindfulness techniques, by being bluntly honest with myself, by devoting myself to my art and my creativity, and by learning to observe my actions. It is also true to say that since I have been helping people on the internet, as a volunteer de facto therapist, I have been able to better understand myself, to accept my disorder, and this is important I feel. By helping others we grow spiritually and intellectually.

None of us are perfect but, by accepting what is imperfect about us, by being honest about what we do wrong, we can work on it and improve ourselves. It is important to forgive ourselves, to admit when we do wrong and try to do better the next time. In this special edition, I will include a script from Dr Bob Rich’s volunteering talk that he gave at a seminar not long ago.

Today I can see that my bipolar 2 is becoming more and more manageable to a point where, very soon, I won’t be able to say that I suffer with it any longer. This improvement has been possible because of my attitude, my desire to be part of the society and not let stigma rule my life. It is an attitude that I have developed especially because I have had the fortune to meet people who are not prejudiced against the mentally ill and these people have provided a stigma free environment so that I could find my way and feel part of society in my own way. Bob was one of these persons who has helped me in my journey to find myself.

Stigma is always present and prejudice is part of our lives, but now I am stronger than these energies based on ignorance and myths so that they don’t hurt me any longer. Because I have developed resilience, I can confront stigma and work hard at educating people about it.

Alfredo Zotti

Dr Bob Rich Volunteering Talk

Here are three cries for help. I know you can read ¾ just indicate when you’re finished with each screen.

I have been doing email therapy with people like this for over 12 years now. My payment is the joy when they come good.

Some, like the last one, is a single exchange of emails. I corresponded with the girl I called Crissie for months. Then she contacted me a couple of years later when she was having conflict with her parents. A year later she let me know that she was at University, studying to be a psychologist. She’ll be brilliant as a therapist.

The girl from the Middle East is a currently active granddaughter. For weeks now, she’s sent me an email almost every day. We are engaged in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (I got her to look it up). We exchanged emails yesterday morning.

Perhaps for the first time in her life, she feels good about herself. I’ve also put her in contact with two young women from America, who’d sent me cries for help, and are now doing wonderfully well.

I don’t have the time to show you a sample, but it’s included in the power point version you can grab.

Why am I crazy enough to load my busy day with work I don’t get paid for?

The more you give, the more you get.

But there is paradox beneath paradox here. If you give in order to get, you are not giving, so you won’t be getting.

That’s to say, if you give for selfish reasons, you miss out on the wonderful satisfaction given by pleasure caused.

Then we get to the paradox beneath that one. If you do not already have the benefit that comes from the love of giving, how do you get it?

By giving, even for selfish reasons. After awhile, it becomes natural.

When you reach the point that if you stopped doing it you’d feel diminished, then you are no longer selfish, but a giver, someone for whom it is true: the more you give the more you get.

I am fortunate that I discovered the antidepressant qualities of giving early in life. As a youngster, I KNEW I was stupid, and ugly, and guaranteed to stuff up anything I tried, and that no one could love me.

One of the ways I could distract myself from this was to get involved in the problems of others.

At first I was surprised that I actually made a difference for the other person, and then I could feel good about myself for a while.

I no longer need antidepressants, even of such good kinds. However, I still get joy when I manage to lead a person from helplessness and despair to inner strength and positivity.

Of course, most people pay me for the service, but that is incidental.

One of my ways of earning an income is to provide therapy via email. I set this up in 1999.

To draw attention to my service, I found web sites with agony columns, and ended up offering pro bono answers on the most popular one. This is:

http://www.queendom.com/advices/index.htm

And, while I do this for the love of it, I also benefit financially. Very recently, a paying email client found me because an internet search led her to an answer at Queendom ¾ which I posted 11 years ago!

When I started answering cries for help at Queendom, I was one of about 10 therapists of various kinds. Last year, I suddenly realised that I was the only one left. I spread the word, and since then a few others have started.

Hundreds of questions keep coming in, and it’s simply not possible to answer them all. I would REALLY LOVE IT if some of you decided to join me in helping out.

You can do so at:

http://www.queendom.com/advices/network/counsellor_application.htm

Let’s go back to why you should bother.

As Erica will know, there is a wonderful Jewish custom called the Mitzvah. It is a secret good deed.

If you do something nice for someone, your reward is that person’s appreciation, thanks or admiration. But if you keep it a secret, the reward is that you know you are a good person.

The idea is that if I steal something and never get found out, my punishment is that I know that I am a thief. If I am helpful, my reward is that I know that I am a helpful person.

An act is its own reward or punishment.

You can try this as an experiment. Today, look for a chance to do a secret good deed, and as you do it, say “Mitzvah” in your heart. Observe how that makes you feel.

As psychologists, we have training and skills to relieve suffering. By doing so without payment, we enjoy the same kind of spiritual growth as when doing a Mitzvah.

“The most effective way of helping others is to make spiritual progress oneself and the best way to make spiritual progress oneself is by helping others.” [Brazier, Zen Therapy, 1995].

Both illustrate that:

Only two things matter in life:

what you take with you when you die,

and what you leave in the hearts of others.

Everything else is Monopoly money.

Other word-press links to Alfredo’s writings:

Carlo Alberto Rossi e Luciano Zotti  http://alfredo123.wordpress./2011/10/20/carolo-alberto-rossi-luciano-zotti/

Ubuntu: a Definition of Human Intelligence http://alfredo123.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/ubuntu-a-definition-of-human-intelligence/

Anthony Minghella and humanitarian gifted people http://alfredo123.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/anthony-minghella-and-humanitarian-gifted-people/

Still require better care http://alfredo123.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/the-mentally-ill-still-require-better-care/

A Room of One’s Own http://alfredo123.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/567/

An idea towards a unified theory of anguish http://alfredo123.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/tautoa-an-idea-towards-a-unified-theory-of-anguish-a-pilot-study-alfredo-zotti-2011/

The Mass Media and Mental Illness http://alfredo123.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/313/

Katy Sara Culling  http://alfredo123.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/katy-sara-culling/