Archive for the ‘Australians’ Category
How Australia is faring on global indices
park yourself here?
Many Australians were greatly relieved at the change of Federal government from May 21 2022. Australia hadn’t been faring well on the international stage, especially with respect to the global warming crisis, but also regarding political governance and other issues. Of course the Labor government has only been in office for three months, so I don’t expect judgements to have turned around significantly at this point. The purpose of this piece is to describe Australia’s position on a number of international surveys, and then to return to those surveys in about twelve months’ time to see if and how the view of Australia internationally has changed.
I was motivated to write this by a passage in David Brophy’s book China Panic, in which he mentioned two such international surveys, the CIVICUS monitor, which apparently measures democratic credentials, and Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. I’d never heard of these surveys, which is hardly surprising for a dilettantish autodidact. Three surveys I have monitored are the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the OECD’s Better Life Index and the UN’s Human Development Index. So now we have five, and counting. What follows is my attempt to summarise their most current findings.
The CIVICUS monitor. CIVICUS is, as far as I can tell, not an acronym. Based in Johannesburg, the organisation describes itself as:
a global alliance of civil society organisations and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world…. Our definition of civil society is broad and covers non-governmental organisations, activists, civil society coalitions and networks, protest and social movements, voluntary bodies, campaigning organisations, charities, faith-based groups, trade unions and philanthropic foundations. Our membership is diverse, spanning a wide range of issues, sizes and organisation types.
According to Brophy, the CIVICUS monitor downgraded Australia’a democratic status (in the broad sense described above) from ‘open’ to ‘narrowed’ in 2019. The latest findings, from 2021, are unchanged. To explain, the monitor divides the world’s nations into 5 levels, which, top to bottom, are open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed. On further inspection, I’ve found that there’s a ‘live rating’, last updated for Australia on 25/5/22, a few days after the election. Hopefully things will have improved by 2023. To compare a few other countries – New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Uruguay, Suriname, Taiwan, Portugal and most Northern European countries are classed as ‘open’. Other ‘narrowed’ countries include Namibia, Italy, France, the UK, Japan and Bulgaria. Obstructed countries include the USA, Brazil, South Africa, Ukraine, Poland, Indonesia and Morocco. A colour-coded map provides an at-a-glance reference to any country of interest. The repressed and closed countries can generally be guessed at. China, Vietnam and most Middle Eastern counties are classed as ‘closed’.
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The CPI is a product of Transparency International, which advertises itself thus:
Transparency International is a global movement working in over 100 countries to end the injustice of corruption. We focus on issues with the greatest impact on people’s lives and hold the powerful to account for the common good. Through our advocacy, campaigning and research, we work to expose the systems and networks that enable corruption to thrive, demanding greater transparency and integrity in all areas of public life.
First set up in 1993 by an ex-World Bank official, Peter Eigen and like-minded associates, first-hand witnesses of global corruption, the organisation was established in then recently re-unified Berlin.
An article in The Conversation, posted in late January 2022, points out that in 2012 Australia ranked level with Norway in 7th position as to ‘cleanness’. The 2021 index, to which The Conversation refers, sees Australia as having slipped to 18th while Norway has risen to 4th, out of 180 countries. Much of what Brophy writes in China Panic is an account of why the country I happen to have ended up in has fallen so far so fast. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which publishes the Democracy Index, is one of the sources for this index, along with Freedom House and the World Justice Project. The three equal top countries on this index are New Zealand, Denmark and Finland, and the bottom three are Somalia, Syria and South Sudan. Anyway, re Australia, this one will be worth watching over the next few years.
The Democracy Index. I’ve written about the Democracy Index, inter alia, in a previous piece. It’s produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit, associated with The Economist magazine in the UK. Here’s their raison d’être blurb:
The EIU Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of world democracy for 165 independent states and two territories. The Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. Based on their scores on 60 indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime or authoritarian regime
Australia ranks a fairly creditable 9th on the Democracy Index list for 2021, well below NewZealand (2nd) but also well above the country we’ve been showing so much allegiance to in recent decades, the USA, which ranks 26th and is considered a flawed democracy. According to the index’s ratings, the world is inching towards hell in a hand basket – 70% of the world’s nations have become less democratic in the last twelve months, and this downward trend has prevailed for some years. Australia, though, has been faring worse than most. I don’t have access to the previous rankings, but each nation is given an annual score out of ten. Australia’s 2021 score is 8.90, compared to 8.96 in 2020. The score has regularly dropped from a high of 9.22 in the years 2010-2012, the period of the Rudd-Gillard Labor Prime Ministerships.
The OECD Better Life Index. This measures the ‘life experience’ of an ‘elite’ group of about 40 of the world’s wealthiest countries, members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to eleven different criteria, including education, environment, safety and health. When I first accessed the index, about 6 or 7 years ago, Australia was ranked number 2 across all criteria, behind the ever-triumphant Norway, and well ahead of the US in around 12th spot. Currently Australia is ranked 7th, and the USA 8th. Norway still ranks first.
On looking into Australia’s ranking for each criterion (the 11 criteria are housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance) I can’t help but scratch my head at some of the results. Australia ranks 1st for ‘civic engagement’, but 20th for ‘community’ (!!??). I would have thought that one entails the other. Also, Australia ranks 2nd for housing (but city rental has become unaffordable for most young people), and 2nd for education, which again surprises me from a general persecutive, though our post-grad sector definitely punches above its weight. At the other end of the spectrum, Australia ranks 30th for safety, another surprise. The OECD claims that the average homicide rate for member countries is 2.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia’s homicide rate for 2019-20 was 1.02 per 100,000, the highest in nearly ten years, but clearly well below the OECD average. Of course, homicide is only one measure, but I’ve not heard of Australia having a high crime rate in general. Strange. But the worst ranking is 33rd for work-life balance!? But having rarely worked a day in my life, I couldn’t possibly comment.
The UN Human Development Index (HDI). Here’s the blurb about this one:
The Human Development Index, or HDI, is a metric compiled by the United Nations and used to quantify a country’s “average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living.” Human Development Index value is determined by combining a country’s scores in a vast and wide-ranging assortment of indicators including life expectancy, literacy rate, rural populations’ access to electricity, GDP per capita, exports and imports, homicide rate, multidimensional poverty index, income inequality, internet availability, and many more.
The HDI website only provides information from 2019 and places Australia in a tie with The Netherlands at 8th in the world, with a score of .944 on a scale from 0 to 1. Norway again gets top spot, just ahead of Ireland and Switzerland. Interestingly, Australia ranks higher than four countries it likes to compare itself with, the UK, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, but little explanation is given for the ranking, which appears to be have been stable for a few years.
So, to summarise, I don’t know what to make of all these indices, which I suspect subtly influence each other in their ratings. We appear to always make the top ten, but rarely the top 5. If we could take advantage of our climate and resources to be be a greater power in renewables, instead of lagging (except in domestic rooftop solar) as we have done over the last decade, we could really make the world pay more attention to us, for better or worse.
References
David Brophy, China Panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering, 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/11111111111
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hdi-by-country
who really discovered this land?
a chart of early human migrations – and discoveries – based on mitochondrial DNA
I recently heard some rather absurd but unsurprising remarks by the conservative commentator Georgina Downer, defending an inscription on a statue of Captain Cook which states that he was the discoverer of Australia. Downer claimed that this is patently, unarguably true, since he was the first person to map the country (or part of it).
But let me be quite precise about the issue. The statue has the inscription: “discovered this territory 1770”. Unfortunately I can’t find video online of Downer’s words, but I’m pretty sure I got the gist of it: to her it was obviously true that Cook was the country’s discoverer – because he mapped it.
As a teacher of English and a person interested in linguistics and the meanings of words, let me just take a look at the verb ‘discover’. A quick googling brings up these two most pertinent meanings: find unexpectedly or during a search; be the first to find or observe. Three other less relevant meanings are given, but of course none of them mention mapping or anything like it. It would certainly be a shocker if mapping was mentioned, in defining the discovery of a territory. Having said that, ‘discover’ is ambiguous in this context. We can be enticed by adverts to discover the Greek Islands, or the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef. This is in line with one of the other definitions, which now maybe seems more relevant: be the first to recognize the potential of (or in this case the more personal to recognise the potential (or beauty) of something for the first time. That’s my own definition, but I think it’s generally acceptable). In this sense it would be fair to say Cook discovered Australia in 1770, but then it would also be fair to say my parents discovered Australia in 1962, when they first arrived here, just as I discovered David Bowie as a sixteen-year-old in 1972. Clearly that’s not the sense of ‘discovered’ intended by the inscription, or by Downer.
But before I continue down that rabbit-hole, let’s look at the inscription’s other keyword. The word ‘territory’ is a little ambiguous here. The statue is in Sidney’s Hyde Park – does the discovery refer to the whole of Australia, the territory in the neighbourhood of the statue, or the part of Australia that Cook mapped (less than a quarter of the country’s coastline, and none of the interior)? Dictionaries won’t be of much help here, so I’ll just hope to be on safe territory in assuming the whole kit and caboodle is intended, i.e. the land now known as Australia.
Downer’s comments added a tiny wind to the storm of controversy raised by the respected Aboriginal journalist and commentator Stan Grant. I find his essays (linked below) on the subject of our history and monuments to be thought-provoking and valuable. What he writes about the hubris of colonising Europeans in earlier centuries is undoubtedly true, though we only see it in hindsight, for what would my attitude have been as a good citizen of Europe from the 16th through to the 19th century?
But I’m not, I’m a more or less global citizen of the 21st century, painfully aware of the thoughtless arrogance of the terra nullius idea and the white colonisation system of the past, not confined of course to this territory. That’s not to say that I can put myself into the minds of those whose ancestors have been in this land for tens of thousands of years, when they read the above-mentioned controversial inscription. I can, though, see clearly that what happened in 1788 was a land-grab, as I’ve already written here and here, and I well understand why two High Court justices have described the consequent dispossession as ‘a legacy of unutterable shame’. So it amazes me that people like Downer can be so cavalier in claiming that Cook’s ‘discovery’ was unarguable. Cook did not discover this territory. The human who did discover it, that first person, will never be known to us. That discovery was made long long before records were kept. It was certainly a momentous discovery, though, for it brought many people to this vast territory, which may then have been very different from the parched land we know today. They spread throughout its vast extent, adapted to and interpreted its varied and changing climate and landscapes, created homes and tools and songs and stories and rituals and languages and knowledge, and endured here – more than endured – for some 60,000 years.
Cook was a very important, indeed decisive figure in Australian history, and he should be remembered as such, but not as the discoverer of this territory. As the cliché goes, if we don’t know our history we’ll be doomed to repeat it.
References
who’s being stupid here?
Conservative MP Christian Porter thinks Aboriginal people should stop being stupid and crazy
Interesting that the Federal Minister of Social Security, one Christian Porter, when asked about the move by more local councils to no longer hold citizenship ceremonies on January 26, dismissed them all as nutty and stupid. Considering that the majority of Aboriginal Australians consider that day as a day of mourning for what they’ve lost, this is tantamount to calling those Aboriginal Australians nutty and stupid. But then, these people are in a minority in Australia, so presumably Porter feels safe in insulting them. I’m hopeful that there will be a backlash against this sort of inadvertent and lazy racism.
So the Darebin City Council, which adjoins the Yarra Council in Melbourne, has just announced that it too will boycott January 26 as a special day. To be consistent, the Feds will have to strip that council of its citizenship-bestowing function. And so on.
In this interesting article by James Purtill, written some six months ago, it’s pointed out that 1988, the bicentenary of the British land-grab, marked one of the biggest marches ever seen in Sidney. Since then, the issue has waxed and waned but has never gone away. These moves by local councils will bring the issue out in the open again, making it less easy to dismiss the many people who have reservations about this date as nut-jobs. The debate needs to be civil and respectful, but to me it’s a no-brainer. The date needs to change.
nationalism, memes and the ANZAC legend
Canto: Okay, I get livid when I hear the unquestioning and unquestioned pap spoken about the Anzacs, year in year out, and when I hear primary teachers talking about their passion for Anzac Day, and teaching it to impressionable young children. Not sure how they will teach it, but when such remarks are followed by a middle-aged woman knitting poppy rosettes and saying ‘after all, if it wasn’t for them [the Anzacs] we would’t be here’, I’m filled with rage and despair about the distortions of history to suit some kind of nationalist pride and sentimentality.
Jacinta: Yes, that sort of thing leads to innocent, impressionable young children parroting the meme ‘they died so we could be free’.
Canto: Or in this case the even more absurd ‘they died so that we could exist’…
Jacinta: On the other hand, to be fair, many young people go off to Anzac Cove to commemorate their actual grand-fathers or great-great uncles who died there, and they’re captivated by their story of sacrifice.
Canto: Yes, and this memory should be kept, but for the right, evidence-based reasons. What did these young men sacrifice themselves for, really?
Jacinta: Well as we know, the reasons for the so-called Great War were mightily complex, but we can fairly quickly rule out that there was ever a threat to Australia’s freedom or existence. Of course it’s hard to imagine what would have happened if the Central Powers had won.
Canto: Well it’s hard to imagine them actually winning, but say this led to an invasion of Britain. Impossible to imagine this lasting for long, what with the growing involvement of the US. Of course the US wasn’t then the power it later became, but there’s little chance it would’ve fallen to the Central Powers, and it was growing stronger all the time, and as the natural ally of its fellow English-speaking nation, it would’ve made life tough for Britain’s occupiers, until some solution or treaty came about. Whatever happened, Australia would surely not have been in the frame.
Jacinta: Britain’s empire might’ve been weakened more quickly than it eventually was due to the anti-colonisation movement of the twentieth century. And of course another consequence of the Central Powers’ victory, however partial, might’ve been the failure or non-existence of Nazism…
Canto: Yes, though with the popularity of eugenics in the early twentieth century, master-race ideology, so endemic in Japan, would still have killed off masses of people.
Jacinta: In any case your point still holds true. Those young men sacrificed themselves for the British Empire, in its battle against a wannabe Germanic Empire, in a war largely confined to Europe.
Canto: But really in order to understand the mind-set of the young men who went to war in those days, you have to look more to social history. There was a naive enthusiasm for the adventure of war in those days, with western nations being generally much more patriarchal, with all the negative qualities entailed in that woeful term.
Jacinta: True, and that War That Didn’t End All Wars should, I agree, be best remembered as marking the beginning of the end of that war-delighting patriarchy that, in that instance, saw the needless death of millions, soldiers who went happily adventuring without fully realising that the massive industrialisation of the previous decades would make mincemeat out of so many of them. I’ve just been reading and watching videos of that war so as not to make an idiot of myself, and what I’ve found is a bunch of nations or soi-disant empires battling to maintain or regain or establish their machismo credentials in the year 1914. With no side willing to give quarter, and no independent mechanisms of negotiation, it all quickly degenerated into an abysmal conflict that no particular party could be blamed for causing or not preventing.
Canto: And some six million men were just waiting to get stuck in, an unprecedented situation. And what happened next was also unprecedented, a level of carnage never seen before in human history. The Battle of the Frontiers, as it was called, saw well over half a million casualties, within a month of the outbreak.
Jacinta: And so it went, carnage upon carnage, with the Gallipoli campaign – unbearable heat, flies, sickness and failure – being just one disaster among many. Of course it infamously settled into a war of attrition for some time, and how jolly it must’ve been for the allies to hear that they would inevitably be the victors, since the Central Powers would run out of cannon fodder first. It was all in the maths. War is fucked, and that particular war is massively illustrative of that fact. So stop, all teachers who want to tell the story of the heroic Anzacs to our impressionable children. I’m not saying they weren’t brave and heroic. I’m not saying they didn’t do their best under the most horrendous conditions. I’m certainly not saying their experience in fighting for the mother country was without value. They lived their time, within the confines and ideology of their time, as we all do. They played their part fully, in terms of what was expected of them in that time. They did their best. And it’s probably fair to say their commanders, and those above them, the major war strategists, also did their best, which no doubt in some cases was better than others. Even so, with all that, we have to be honest and clear-sighted and say they didn’t die, or have their lives forever damaged, so that we could be free. That’s sheer nonsense. They died so that a British Empire could maintain its ascendency, for a time, over a German one.
Canto: Or in the case of the French and the Russians, who suffered humungous casualties, they died due to the treaty entanglements of the time, and their overlords’ obvious concerns about the rise of Germany.
Jacinta: So all this pathos about the Anzacs really needs to be tweaked, just a wee bit. I don’t want to say they died in vain, but the fact is, they were there, at Gallipoli, in those rotten stinking conditions, in harm’s way, because of decisions made above their heads. That wasn’t their fault, and I’m reluctant, too, to blame the commanders, who also lived true to their times. Perhaps we should just be commemorating the fact that we no longer live in those macho, authoritarian times, and that we need to always find a better way forward than warfare.
local councils, Australia Day and federal bullying
It’s all ours boys, from sea to flamin sea. Forget those damn Yanks, our Empire’s just beginning!
Recently a local council, the Yarra City Council, which covers a large portion of the eastern and north-eastern inner suburbs of Melbourne, opted to stop holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day, January 26, because of local sensibilities. It has posted the details of its decision, and the reasons for it, online. I find those reasons unexceptionable, but then I’m not a nationalist, I prefer to take an internationalist, humanist view on such issues. So I’ve never celebrated Australia Day, any more than I would celebrate the national day of any other country I happened to land up in, though I relish local customs, cuisines etc.
I have of course noticed, having lived in this country for over fifty years, that Australia Day has become controversial in recent years, for good reason. I happen to be reasonably knowedgable about the date, having read a bit of Australian history and having, over many years, taught the history of that date – Cook’s mapping of Australia’s east coast, the reasons for sending out the first fleet, the arrival in Port Jackson, the planting of the flag, and Britain’s obviously questionable claim to sovereignty – to NESB students in a number of community centres – the very places, sometimes, where citizenship ceremonies were carried out.
It seems clear to me that this date for celebrating Australian nationhood, which really only started to become controversial in the eighties, will eventually be changed. Until it is, controversy will grow. The Yarra Council decision is another move in that controversy, and it won’t be the last. It would be great if this change happened sooner rather than later, to nip the acrimony in the bud, but I doubt that will happen. The Federal Government has used what powers it has to prevent Yarra Council from holding citizenship ceremonies, arguing that the council has politicised the day. However, the controversy that has grown up over the date has always been a political one. Yarra Council’s decision was political, just as was the response of the Feds. On January 26 1788 a Union Jack was raised at Sydney Harbour, and all the land extending to the north, the south, and the west – some 7,692,000 square kilometres, though its extent was completely unknown at the time – was claimed as the possession of Britain, in spite of its clearly being already inhabited. If that wasn’t a political decision, what was it?
The Assistant Minister for Immigration, Alex Hawke, has spoken for the Feds on this matter. Their argument is that citizenship itself has been politicised by Yarra Council’s decision:
“The code is there to make sure that councils don’t do these sorts of things. We don’t want citizenship ceremonies being used as a political argument for anybody’s political advancement one way or the other.
“It’s our role to uphold the code. We warned them not to do this or we would have to cancel their ability to do it, and I regret that they’ve done it.”
The code being referred to here is the Citizenship Ceremonies Code. The Yarra City Mayor, Amanda Stone, believes the council’s decision isn’t in breach of it. This may or may not be so, but this isn’t really the point. The chosen date for celebrating Australia day commemorates a highly political event, which can never be wished away. Marking this day as the most appropriate day for immigrants to become Australians valorises the date, and the event – essentially a land-grab – even more. So it seems odd, to me, that a decision not to promote this land-grab as representative of the much-touted Australian ‘fair go’, should be worthy of criticism, let alone condemnation and punishment.
Generally the Federal polllies’ response to all this has been confused and disappointing. Our PM has said this, according to the ABC:
“An attack on Australia Day is a repudiation of the values the day celebrates: freedom, a fair go, mateship and diversity”
Turnbull knows well enough, though, that the council’s decision isn’t an attack on the concept of Australia Day. It’s a recognition that the date is unacceptable to many people – precisely because that date itself repudiates the values of freedom and fair play, in a very obvious way. Turnbull isn’t stupid, he’s just doing what he’s done so many times of late, making politically expedient noises to maintain the support of his mostly more conservative colleagues.
The Labor leader Bill Shorten’s half-and-half response is also typically political. Here’s how the ABC reports it:
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten was also critical of the move.
“Reconciliation is more about changing hearts and minds than it is about moving public holidays,” Mr Shorten said.
“But, of course, if we look at national days important in the history of this country, there is March 1 1901, when the Australian parliament, the Australian nation came into being.”
In other words, ‘reconciliation is about nothing so trivial as the dates of public holidays but, hey, maybe March 1 should be our Australia Day’. Caspar Milquetoast would have been proud of that one.
We’re just at the beginning of this tussle, and the end, I think, is inevitable. Yarra Council isn’t the first to make this decision. The Fremantle Council did the same in December last year, but was bullied into backing down by the Feds. The Yarra Council seems more firm in its resolve, and obviously other councils will follow in due course. The Turnbull government will fall at the next election, and this will encourage more council action and more public debate on the issue. It’ll be interesting to observe how long it all takes…
nones, rinos and new australians – we’re becoming more secular, but also more religiously complex
So the census data on religion, and everything else, has just come out, and it wasn’t as I’d predicted (in my mind). I expected a rise in the nones but I opted for a more conservative result, partly because of so many wrong predictions (in my mind) in the recent past, but mainly because I didn’t really expect the accelerating rise in recent censuses to continue for too much longer, I expected a few wobbles on the path to heathenism. Not so much two steps forward and one step back, more like a mixture of giant strides and baby steps.
So the result is encouraging and more people are taking note and it has clear implications for areas of social and political policies in which religion plays a part, such as funding for religion in schools, marriage equality, abortion rights, euthanasia, tax exemptions for religious organisations, school chaplains and the like.
So let’s take a closer look at the findings. The graph I present at the top of this post is identical to the one I posted about 5 years ago, except that the last bar, representing the 2016 figures, is added. And it’s quite a spectacular finding, showing that the acceleration is continuing. The drop in the assertively Christian sector is way bigger than expected (in my mind), from a little under 60% to just over 50%. That’s really something, and there’s no doubt that figure will be well under 50% by next census. So much for the twilight of atheism – at least in this benighted backwater. The figure for the assertively non-religious has taken a bigger jump than in any previous census – we only started measuring the category in 1971. That was a surprise, as was the size of the drop in Catholics (and the Anglican population continues to diminish). The figure of 30.1% for the nones, up from 22.3% in 2011, should be supplemented by a goodly percentage of the ‘not-stated/inadequately described’ category, which makes up about 10%, barely changed from last census. This would make for a figure of more than a third of our population professing no religion.
The figure for ‘other religions’ continues to rise but it’s still under 10%. It’s hardly cause for concern exactly, but we should always be vigilant about maintaining a thoroughly secular polity and judiciary. It has served us, and other secular countries, very well indeed. Meanwhile the mix of other religions makes for greater complexity and diversity, and hopefully will prevent the dominance of any particular religious perspective. We should encourage dialogue between these groups to prevent religious balkanisation.
These results really do give hope that the overall ‘no religion’ figure, now at around 30%, will overtake the overall Christian figure, at about 51%, in my lifetime. If the trend continues to accelerate, that may well happen by 2026. Meanwhile it’ll be fascinating to see how these results play out in the political and social arena in the near future, and what Christian apologists have to say about them.
Of course, the census hardly provides a fine-grained view of the nation’s religious affiliations. I’ve not said much about the ‘rino’ population before – that’s those who are ‘religious in name only’. In fact I only heard that acronym for the first time two days ago, but I’ve long been aware of the type, and I’ve met a few ‘Catholics’ who fit the bill. It really does gripe me that more of these people don’t come out as non-believers, but of course I can’t get inside their heads. Certainly church attendance has dropped markedly in recent years, but it’s impossible to know whether these nominal believers would follow religious lines on hot-button topics like euthanasia or abortion.
The census results, as always, have been published with accompanying ‘expert’ commentaries, and on the religious question they’ve said that the figures don’t really give comfort to Christians or atheists. It’s cloud cuckoo talk, but it doesn’t surprise me. The results speak volumes and give plenty of comfort to those who want religion to be kept well out of politics, and who never want to see a return to powerful Christian lobbies and their incessant and often ridiculous propaganda. Politicians, please take note.
Travel marvel’s rough diamond
A couple of not-so-interesting pics taken of the reception area, Danube deck
All euroed up, my TC and I returned to the Mercure Korona where a great many other travellers were gathering in the lobby with their baggage. I presumed that, unbeknown to us, all of these people were our fellow-cruisers staying at our same hotel, perhaps from all corners of the globe. We hadn’t apparently noticed them because as privileged guests we had the dubious honour of dining and breakfasting, more or less alone, in the elite dining area while our fellows were, as we heard, making happily raucus noises in the hoi polloi eating hall. It really is lonely at the top.
So after a while we were scooped up, along with a handful of Travel Marvel travellers, and taken on a (not Travel Marvel) bus to the Travel Marvel boat awaiting us on the Danube, where we were checked in, assigned a cabin, and given an hour or so to freshen up and explore our new homes before assembling in the lounge for a captain’s welcome and a briefing preperatory to our first guided tour of the city.
Our captain was a tall jovial Serbian or Slovakian with over 30 years of river-cruising experience. He was apparently fluent in German, Dutch, Slovakian and the various Slavic languages but had very limited English, so he had to call on Marion, the cruise director, whenever he groped for an English word, which was often. He introduced Marion as his daughter, and I actually believed him until, at various points during the cruise, he described the bursar as his son, the second captain as his nephew, etc. It was all very merry and familial.
Marion, from Austria, was, of course, our main guide and booster throughout the cruise. She sort of introduced us all to each other, and I was mildly irritated to learn that we were all Australians apart from a half-dozen New Zealanders. And here’s where I should make some separation between my humble piece and Dave Wallace’s essay about the ‘Nadir’ (I must say I effing hate those double-barrelled literary monikers beloved of Yank writers, sorry Dave, RIP). I can’t recall if Wallace mentioned the approximate number of passengers and crew on his Nadir, but it was surely in the thousands, and in fact a few of our passengers had been on these big sea cruises and gave them the thumbs down in comparison to our scenic/historic land/river cruise. It was my TC who garnered this info, being far more convivial and extravert than my shy/aloof self. Our own boat, which I now christen the Rough Diamond in remembrance of my Aussie fellow-travellers – doctors, nurses, teachers, truckies, shop assistants, landscapers, postal clerks, real estate agents and others we didn’t know of, some of them morbidly obese, others like myself only mildly so, and most of them in retirement – had little in common with the Nadir. For a start, it was too modest a beast to be treated with absolute disdain. No write-ups by famous prostitute-authors, and certainly no need for red dots telling you where you are on the boat (I call it a boat though I overheard a nautical chat between passengers one of whom was officially advised, he said, that it was a ship, not a boat) . Its maximum carrying capacity, in people terms, was 140-odd passengers and 42 crew. There were 4 decks, the lower deck, the Moselle, which had only a few cabins, as well as a fitness room and storage areas, then deck 2, the Danube, deck 3 (our deck), the Rhine, and above us the sun deck. It was all very tight-knit and cosy.