John Linton
....one of those questions most people ask themselves at least once a year - usually when they wake up and realise it's their birthday once again - and so it is for me today. Where did it all that time go and why did I waste so much of it doing things I should never have done?
Oh well.....not being someone who is very 'philosophical' nor someone who dwells on the past (except after too much red wine) that phase of the one day of the year is usually over within a few minutes and in any of the days I can remember never lasts past the time it takes to have a shower and glance at the morning paper over a cup of coffee.
My glance at this morning's paper included the page opposite the cryptic crossword which includes the obituaries (I wonder if there's some association between people who do cryptic crosswords and people who read obituaries?). The whole of today's obituary section was taken up with the reporting of the death of Clyde Cameron (SMH page 14) but what struck me was the smaller/back and white photograph of the five main ministers at the beginning of the Whitlam Government:
Rex Connor, Clyde Cameron, Jim Cairns, Gough Whitlam and Lionel Murphy.
Can there ever have been, in the history of democratic government, a more inept and stupid bunch of people assembled in one photograph who had the power to destroy a wealthy and happy country in so short a time? (yes - probably that infamous record will be broken in 2010 but that is still in doubt).
For those people who are too young to have first hand knowledge of what each of those idiots did between 1972 and 1974 I suggest you spend a few minutes with Google as I'm pretty sure that the Australian education system would not have even given a precis of their stupidities. (those schools that actually teach Australian Political History at all).
The obituary, always written respectfully, cannot catalogue the disasters perpetrated by Cameron in full but it does contain some facts:
1) Enacting legislation in the first two years of the Whitlam Government causing male wages to rise by 43% and female wages by 60%.
2) Enacting legislation that gave preference in employment to union members.
These two pieces of class warfare genius (it should be remembered that Cameron was made a Cabinet Minister with an education that ended before his 15th birthday) plunged Australia into recession with massive layoffs driving unemployment to the highest level since the depression causing Whitlam to move the uneducated Cameron from Labour to Immigration where his most famous contribution was to refuse a visa to an Indian Chef on the basis that "there were plenty of shearer's cooks looking for work".
Shortly after, Treasury ran out of money and the subsequent election saw that bunch of loonies thrown out in a landslide - but the damage they did in less than three years burdened Australia for the next two decades.
As it is my birthday I recalled that I actually voted for Whitlam/Labor and therefore was, in a miniscule way, partially responsible for all of that misery. It was the one and only time I've voted for the ALP and I have no excuse except that I was very young and completely politically uneducated - something I still am I suppose.
Youth, like being given the vote at 18, is wasted on the young.
So it took me longer than most March 25th's to get my mind back to current day reality.
Today we will begin the very complex process of doubling Exetel's ADSl user base over the next 12 months and, after a four day long weekend of rest there can be no better state of mind to be in.
I'll talk with Steve later this morning about a rough agenda for the whole project and put the first two or three actions in to place.
It will be an exciting few months.