'perth and the big sleep ' a newer version : AZ IMC

'perth and the big sleep' a newer version
by greg hoey Friday December 16, 2005 at 05:12 PM
josephh@mail.com

an account of the atmospherics generated at the last election

Though I rarely read the 'West Australian', unless for reasons
unconnected to journalistic informative sourcing, [the newspapers
editor paul armstrong who's inexperience and editorial
irresponsibility/ineptitude make a mockery of politically independant
& unbiased reportage, and who has a singularly unabiding hatred of
any whom may deviate away from the narrow small-minded bigoted and
uncompromisingly anglo-iconised focus he himself is given to
promoting at the expense of all else, especially it seems those with
any irish heritage for some unexplained reason? though he's not on his own all the journos that work in the main areas of the media here are so clubby, if you challenge one you pretty well challenge them all.Perths isolation can make it very prone to excessive scrutinization of any whom do'nt follow the jolly little white script], it was however with
despair that I observed an article written by paul murray in the
saturday morning edition of this particular newspaper, where he
seemed to be promoting the potential of the opposition leader Colin
Barnett, to serve our state in a leadership capacity.

There is in
this thought the potential for concern. As for all the self-serving
,self-righteous, moralising, preaching, hypocrisy of the Gallop
government, I worry of the alternative even more in some ways.
The
opposition leader it seems is an ordinary enough bloke someone you
would be quite happy to have as a member of the community or even
as a decent co-member of any particular sort of recreational group
etc., or even someone to just meet and greet in the street, however
for a potential 'premier' he is absolutely lacking in charisma,
broadmindedness, and imagination and unfortunately this type of
personality when placed into positions of power act exactly as
ordinary normal god-fearing people would, these take their
lack of imagination, their ultra-conservative values, along with
their reverence for the establishment right to the top of the pole
with them in their assumed roles as leaders and statesmen, and as we
have seen so many times in the past with right wing individuals as
our leaders the people in the end pay hell for,[not denying all their
concern for family values, why is it that whenever a potential
incumbent rants on about family values when these eventually do take
office they invariably are prone to creating wars, from Hitler to
Mussolini, Genghis Khan and back, history is littered with
self-serving demogogues that got there using the platform of family
values and by kissing babies].
Indeed it would not be wrong to
suggest that this could also be said of the extremist version from
the oppossing political spectrum 'the Left' also. It is hard not to
think of the opposition leader as being in ways a deeply conservative
individual, part of the 'old guard', thanks to whom have held back Perth
for so long with an ultra-orthodox christian type mentality, which
has all but ensured that Perth stays at least 20years behind the rest
of the world for most of last century, all for the misguided view
that being a backwater is going to keep us all safe and out of
mischief .
All this has done is that the establishment cronies have
remained utterly entrenched, and that any idea of Perth being in the
advanced guard as oppossed to the same old rear-guard mentality is be
less an alternative than it ever was. Somehow the idea that isolation
has to mean hostility to new ideas, and an overriding almost
obsessive/compulsive concern for family values, as well an oppressive need for
constancy , just does not sit well for many.
At times it can be difficult not to feel as though Perth is not at all disimilar to the famous david lynch television series of the late eighties 'twin peaks'. It seems to be taking on a 'darkly pretty' sort of vernacular i.e., slightly too normal not to be a little deranged, where everyone is smiley & nice and yet underneath quietly desperate, while tendering pleasant gardens under the midday sun, at the same time completely oblivious to the fact their lovely city is becoming increasingly prone to lurking violence. Serial killers now are as much a part of perth's cultural scene as its beach's. An ocean front now well and truly in the dominion of a certain set or social order of folk, far and way above the average jo's wage capacity. The dividedness based on class that this city has evolved into over recent decades is truly worrying. You have the eastern industrialised suburbs and the well off affluent western suburbs, and the twain rarely meet with repercussions that will become ever increasingly prone to disruptiveness in the future if there is not a philosophical change I fear. Whats so wrong with a convergance of the two worlds, all types of class more closely interelated for a more dynamic city overall.
I personally see no
reason why W.A. cannot become a modern day 21st century version california
style of state, whereby all this backward shitty self-serving
cronyist orthodoxy could not be done away with, and where instead of
always being last on the ladder, Perth for all its isolation cannot
become finally the place where things happen first and reverberate
elsewhere , like the epi-center of a shockwave.
Why the need in such
an extraordinarily rich location to have so much entrenched ignorance
, wage and class disparity [western australia has always been behind
the rest of australia when it comes to the median wage], and yet all
along the river frontage one sees 5-20 million dollar houses many of
which are holiday homes for the itinerant wealthy.
In fact taking
Perths riverfront as an example of irrelevant old style thinking, it
is a riverfront that should be at the very center of action and for
all Perths citizens, yet it seems to remain the domain of the rich
and almost a closely guarded secret. Any really intelligent community
would utilise the astonishingly beautiful Swan river as the cities
main meeting place and hub, which was in fact the case in the early
part of the 20th century.
Instead the river has become a fairly
isolated attraction dominated by the homes of the rich and a place
that one would go to infrequently , and then usually for special
occassions only, or unless one had the use of a boat ,canoe
yacht or was associated with some other water sport. It has by ways
always been promoted purely to be looked at from the windows of ones
car while one would drive to and fro to the workplace, or maybe as a
great source of touristic photos. It has not been seen as a place to
live necessarily unless one had won at the lottery.
Environmental
overstress is a more telling example of the blinkered reactionary
mentality that fails to initiate action before it is too late,
because even now when it is common knowledge that our lowered
rainfall is a consequence of deforestation our government and
regulatory bodies still allow suburban developers carte blanche the
go-ahead to build suburb after suburb almost to the very horizon. All
to satisfy the kind of redneck attitude that needs a big empty front
lawn to park their 4-wheel drives upon. Many of which are mild
mannered middleclass semi-professional women between the ages of
25-40.
More recently our government also opened up mineral sands
mining in one of our last remaining reserves of Tuart trees. Giants
as fragile as they are monolithic. Mineral sands that once are
removed were most likely the very reason such imposing sentinels to
mother natures creative prowess grew there in the first place. This
from a government claiming to care for the environment!

Sadly it is
hard not to feel that our new potential incumbent would be
any more willing to deliver a better outcome for those concerned by
environmental degradation or even bring about the type of change that
might extend beyond the self-same old style doctrinaire this city has
always been known for. -'Over-regulated into the oblivion and
undeniably beautiful to look at but decidedly dull.'
--

written 20/12/04 by greg hoey. edited 17th dec.