Channel 7 1959-2009 Reunion – 50 Years of Perth TV. Can you see me? Hint: blue

First – Anzac Day 2015 – I started work at TVW Channel 7 Perth 49 years ago today. Yes, I started on Anzac Day, a public holiday, in 1966 as a 19 year old nervous nellie. I’d had my interview a week or so beforehand and the Chief Engineer asked me when I wanted to start. “How about next Monday?”, I said. Neither of us remembered that it was a public holiday.

When I remembered, I was far too nervous to ring up and change the day. There were no yuppie phones in those days. I would have had to walk down the street to a phone box. I was too naiive and nervous, so I turned up at my new job on the Monday public holiday. There was hardly anyone around, of course, certainly no-one to show me the ropes, so I just nervously stood in doorways and watched.

We had to fill in time sheets, and there wasn’t one for me. Next day, a normal working day, I filled in my new time sheet and filled in the times for the previous day, which would have been double time for the p/h. To this day, I have no idea whether I was ever paid for that double time day.

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© PJ Croft 2015

“People are saying informally that Australia and Canada are emerging as public enemy number one for the Paris talks on climate,” [Nobel Prize winner Prof. Peter] Doherty said.

“No other names are being mentioned. Australia is seen as very much out of touch and out of sync with what’s happening globally.”

Sir The Lord Abbott QC AO OA SD AM/FM DAB+ AC/DC E&OE KCMG – “Climate change is crap.” Our prime minister is a climate change non-believer so he puts us all in peril for his private beliefs.

Academics at the University of Western Australia have asked the university to break its agreement with the Abbott government to establish a $13m “consensus centre” with Danish climate change contrarian Bjørn Lomborg. [The Guardian]

Fairfax Media has reported the push for the centre came from within the prime minister’s office. Tony Abbott is a known fan of Lomborg’s work, having praised it in his 2009 memoir Battlelines. Lomborg is best known for his 2002 book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which was the subject of complaints to the Danish Committee of Scientific Dishonesty. In 2009 he was named one of Business Insider’s top 10 most respected global warming sceptics.

At a time when we are being told what a perilous state the federal budget is in, the prime minister has allocated $40 million to set up a post at the University of Western Australia to be run by a Danish climate change denier, who, as above, is accused of scientific dishonesty! And UWA has accepted the money and is going ahead with it!

How are we supposed to be proud of this country when our government is so awful???!!!  There is even talk that Abbott could be called to face charges at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the basis that Australia is breaching international law for its treatment of asylum seekers.

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Even the nasty racist UKIP leader in the UK says he couldn’t go as far as Abbott and co in their harsh treatment of refugees!

What about the machinery? Is he endorsing immigration detention, detention of children, forced pushbacks? Farage made it clear he was not. “Some of the ways that Australia acts on these things,” he said, “are tougher than we in Britain can perhaps stomach.”

I am disgusted.

A few weeks ago someone I know told me our views are “diametrically opposed”. How utterly disappointing. That means he:

• Accepts the jailing of children and pregnant women.
• Accepts such deliberately harsh treatment of refugees that they develop mental illnesses and try to commit suicide.
• Thinks climate change is crap, in line with our esteemed PM.
• Thinks it’s acceptable for the federal (I nearly wrote feral) budget cuts to fall mainly on the poorest and lowest paid.
• Thinks it’s fine that ultra high income earners pay no tax, because the government is not interested in fixing loopholes that allow rich people to avoid tax.
• Thinks it’s fine to cut $30 billion from hospitals and schools and telling the states that they’ll just have to find the money.
• Thinks it’s fine for Australia to enter wars without any UN authority (Howard/Iraq/Afghanistan, Abbott/Iraq) or any reference to parliament or even his own cabinet.
• Likes Australian knighthoods, and them being awarded to a foreigner.
• Wants Australia to remain a British colony with a British head of state, with no Australian able to be our own head of state.

I could go on. He knows my views, yet he said “diametrically opposed”. I was very, very disappointed.