Degree equals Related Job, Yes?

I know there is a theme running through my posts of late, and I think you can understand why. I will promise to veer off the path from time to time, but when a man's head is in a certain place, he can find it hard to pull away.
Today, in keeping with my series of epiphanies regarding tertiary education, I wish to make a small, yet scathing remark on the relevancy of University degrees to the careers some people end up doing.
Namely, current (at least for now) President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. You will note that I have gone to the effort of cutting and pasting his name correctly this time, as a gesture to show how serious I am right now. (Also, you gotta love that Ctrl+V hotkey!)
TO briefly describe what Ahmadinejad does these days, I put this to you:

• He is the poster-boy for the world's most hard-nosed Islamic Republic.
  
• He has gone to the UN, and had international leaders visit him in Iran.
  
• He has Vladimir Putin on his speed-dial, and I daresay Putin has him on his.
• He routinely berates the United States and its President (both Bush and Obama, to date), and uses them to justify whatever civil atrocity his administration has recently perpetrated.
  
• He espouses Iran's sovereign right to research, build, and we guess apparently use nuclear weapons, and all this in the face of constant (though balls-less) condemnation from the rest of the world.
  

And what do we know about this man who routinely makes the leaders of the West his bitches? Academically speaking, we should assume, under the existing set of principles in education systems, that a man of this kind of profile, power, and volume would have at least a PhD in something like Law, Political Science, Economics, or Business Management, right?

Well, he doesn't. Not even Accounting, Taxation, Business Administration, or even Graphic Design. In fact, the man does have a degree - he has a doctorate, to be sure. But it ain't in anything remotely connected to violent, bloody revolutions, or religiously-centric governmental policy making. Yes, he was in one version of the Iranian Army, and that no doubt helped his rise to the (almost) top.

Ready for the BIG Reveal?

Ahmadinejad has a degree in..... civil engineering and traffic transportation planning!!!!!

Yes, the man who routinely sticks it to the President of the United States of America, on international television, no less, is a glorified Meter-Maid!

OK maybe it's slightly more than that, but how many of the dignified and honourable politicians running my country or yours are NOT law degrees, or professional, full-time pencil-pushers? How many scientists and engineers are sitting in Parliament or Congress? Hell, how many Doctors are there? We had one once in Australia, back ni the 90s I think. He was ridiculed by the rest of the pollies for it.

In our world, in the West, Ahmadinejad would be writing out parking tickets, pushing buttons on traffic light switchboards, or staring at the Sydney road system every day and automatically throwing up his hands and yelling "I give up!".

But the Iranians have him running their country, and spearheading the PR campaign for their future grisly and green-glowing war against the evil infidels.

On paper, this simply should not occur. But it is.

DISCLAIMER: In no way should this post be taken as an endorsement of President Ahmadinejad, his government or organisation, or any of the atrocities committed by, under, or in the name of him and his administration. The guy is a prick, clear and simple.
It may require much more discussion to see the details, but for now accept this blog-post as an amzing example of how our current, red-tape laden economies and political systems mean nothing at all when compared to other real-life scenarios. We are needlessly perpetuating a myth that is only hurting ourselves.

From The Tominator.

Generation Y Fallacy

Dear Reader/s,
My name is Tom, and I am a Generation Y university graduate (BA), with experience working in no less than four industries, experience living and working overseas in a non-English-speaking country, strong drive to work and earn money, equally strong desire to avoid applying for welfare payouts. Oh yeah, and I can't seem to find a real job.

From what my research tells me, I am not alone, at least on most of those points.

"Generation Y", so-called because it follows Generation "X", has been a favourite to mock for members of the Baby Boomer generation and Gen X. Choice phrases include "job snob" or "dole bludger". Most of the news and commentary in the past few years has been overtly inflammatory, scathing, to say the least, and completely full of vitriolic blame directed at the apparent complacency of my Generation. Those of Generation Y that canno help but bite back (usually over the social media endemic to their generation) have hurled blame and abuse right back at the Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers with equivalent passion and rage.

There cannot really be a Gen X1/2, and Generation Z are still in high school. Generation Y is the only pillar standing to hold up its weight in the ceiling of society. In light of this, is blame-throwing really the best way to approach this complex and critical-to-society issue?
I would argue that it is not.

The assignment of blame, and the passion with which the Assigners deal it out, led directly into World War II (should anyone wish to argue that point with me, send me an email and I shall enlighten you). The Blame-Game is the reason for the screwy nature of the current, existing employment and financial systems, and also for the utterly ball-less treatment of the "Great Financial Crisis" of 2009/10/11/12 (this, too, I can enlighten you on separately). In short, Blame-throwing is a ridiculous, balls-free, inflammatory, uninspired and uninspiring way to deal with any situation.
I realise that blame-assignment comes as naturally to human beings as nose-picking and indigestion. Though I am but a mere lowly BA, my academic and life experiences thusfar have furnished me with more than enough concrete evidence to know that most things that come naturally to human beings are destructive, depressing, and, more often than not, useless.
"Progress", in its original, etymological sense, cannot occur whilst all or any stakeholder in a given situation seeks to assign blame.

How, then, can progress be made in the ludicrous case of Generation Y unemployment?
Why, the only way progress has ever been made, in any situation at any point in time in the past - understanding. The first step should always be to understand the true nature of the problem. One cannot solve the mystery of why their arse doesn't just hover in the air without first acknowledging the presence of Gravity, as well as the necessity for a chair.

In all honesty, I find it simultaneously embarrassing and horrfying that I must spell this out, but the juggernaut tendency of humanity to make the same mistakes over and over, again and again and again and again, forces me to make this clear as day, even if it is only on my personal blog, which enjoys a readership of about three (3).

The Fallacy which faces Generation Y, and has so for along time, finds its roots in the simple fact that with time, things change.
When the Baby Boomers were being sired and born, the world had only just pulled itself out of the largest and most destructive war in human history. Their generational moniker indeed comes from the very real fact that populations around the developed world boomed, and many babies were being born at this time.
The Baby Boomers, through their childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s, enjoyed scientific marvels that a GenY can only dream of, such as witnessing mankind's first forays into space, as well as a the pure fear of the Hydrogen Bomb. Through their adolescence, they enjoyed watching the first man walk on the Moon, the fear of being consripted into Vietnam, peace marches, uninhibited recreational drug-use, sexual promiscuity, the birth of Rock music, the advent of the Pill and the Sexual Revolution, the space race and the arms race, the entire Cold War experience. They knew who their enemies were. Regarding employment, Baby Boomers enjoyed systems of seniority, mysogynist supervisers, Equal Employment Opportunity advents. To sum all that up, the Baby Boomers got to witness the death of one world, and actually got to usher in their own new world at the same time.

Generation X was born during th 60s and 70s, and is a generation that I personally have no experience with. As I was growing up with the rest of GenY, I may have met one or two school-teachers from GenX, but the unwritten rules of social order prohibited me from ever forming relationships with this previous generation. What I can say objectiely is that Gen-Xers seemed to enjoy punk and grunge music a little more than would objectively be considered healthy, used drugs that were more hardcore in their nature, but not as freely available, and generally derided anything cultural that had been produced by previous generations.
Speaking fro the point of view of a political scientist, one could say that GenX was caught in the updraght of the Baby Boomers, with everything major having already been accomplished, the new world already established, but none of it yet bearing fruit that was ripe enough to eat.
Nonetheless, one generation must follow another, and though we may look back at history and say "this generation we could have done without" or "that generation was the only one worth knowing about", we cannot truthfully ignore the fact that, like a chain in time, each generation must link together, even if only for the sake of temporal continuity.

If Generation Y has no chioce but to exist, where is its place? The literal answer is obvious, but the cultural, political, economic, and sometimes even spatial answer is not.

The Baby Boomers got to change the world, and make it in the image they saw fit.
Generation X sidled in the slip-stream of the Boomers, and found itself waiting, and wanting, but almost always getting in the end.
Generation Y exists.... the only word I can use to describe our time is "experimental", with a qualifying add-on of "starved".
Unless any Gen-Xers choose to debate this topic with me (and I always welcome that!), I am happy to say that the Boomers were the upheaval generation, and the GenXers have filled the necessary lull in between, lapping up the ru-off from the gererations past.
If we follow this omnipresent human condition of "boom, lull, boom, lull", we should expect to find Generation Y helming a new boom in societal shaping.

In many way, we do. As many journalists have made comment in recent years, Generation Y is the most technically-savvy of all generations so far. Where Baby Boomers were still grapping with electric lighting, landlines and vinyl records, Generation X fumbled with their mobile phones, VHS cassettes and FM radio, Generation Y has seemed to be born with innate abilities to design, build, and use smartphones, mp3s and Skype. And everything else on the Internet.

In the early 1990s, the ability to type on a computer keyboard would have guaranteed work instantaneously, and even kept soldiers out of combat positions.
Now, Generation Y has grown up with such abilities, and all are competent.

The youth unemployment figures of today would not be anywhere near 10% if "typing" was considered a skill worthy of adding to a CV. If GenY could spruik "can use a smartphone and knows what 'terabyte' means" as a skill, then we would all have jobs with NASA, if we were being judged by 1960s standards. It is a kno fact that a modarn laptop contains many times the computing power of all the vacuum-tubes in all the NASA facilities that put Neil Armstrong on the Moon, and ran the Apollo Program for over 10 years.

If the same mysogynistic seniority of the previous generations existed today, all GenY men would walk out of University and straight into executive-level jobs (by way of a few years junior training, of course), and would find their wives in the typing pools down on level three, because every single young woman who has graduated teaching college would be able to type.

If the standards of the military existed today as they did back in the Cold War, any young man who could not walk into an office job (with guaranteed career security, mind you) would be picked up quick-smart by the military - and if he had a university degree he would start at the rank of Captain or Major.

These are just some examples of the changing standards from one generation to the next.
Sadly, for GenY, and also for their BabyBoomer parents, things are different now.

The ability to type is considered no less than a given, because no-one is getting through uni, let alone high school, without developing a a typing speed of a at least 60 wpm.
The BabyBoomers, with their relentless third-wave of feminism and anti-discrimination, have ensured that the job market will forever be clotted with women on endless maternity leave, men on paid stress-leave, immigrants and second/third generation nationals taking work that was, once upon a time, only fit to give to young white men.

The military nowadays will not except anything less than corporate standards in their recruits - grunt-level jobs are filled with university graduates, technical specialists have at least five years experience in their field before even thinking about joining up, and wannabe-Officers undergo intense, multi-stage interviews and grilling to prove that they have leadership experience in the corporate sector. And this is all good and well, because, in peacetime, the military of any country is no less than an economic cancer, a burden on public resources that could be (ideally) sunk into education reforms and job creation schemes. The military no longer trains young western men from the ground up to shoot at Asians and Germans, but expects to skim only the cream off the top of the recruit pool, fully aware that their tax incentives and superannuation bonuses would be taken away if they were too enthusiastic in handing them out.

Knowing full well what my last two paragraphs must have read like, I should state unequivocally now that the past, the times of growing for the Baby Boomers (and to a relatively lesser extent Generation X) were supremely racist and discriminatory. I make no statements, especially in those two paragraphs, that should be taken as a racist viewpoint on my own behalf, nor that cannot be proven by a simple browse through a history book at your local library.

The past was Racist, it was Prejudiced, and Discriminatory on all accounts. The people growing up in those times were actually aware of it, which explains why I can make the comparison today. The Baby Boomers did most of the work in disallowing most of it. Thanks to that Generation, no potential employer can ask me if I am married or single, and then decide my employablility based on that. Thanks to them, Australia's multicultural society now only faces the traditional kinds of racism - in the schoolyards, in private, and behind our backs.
Thanks to the Boomers, if a woman becomes pregnant, whether she is married or not, she is fully entitled to government benefits, a pension, and up to five years off work withouth having to quit the job outright.
It is in these sorts of revolutionary reforms from the Boomers that Generation X revelled, and took full advantage of, even cleaning up the rules a little more to make it harder to fire unruly employees, and impossible to determine the employability of a person by anything other than how they look on paper.

Generation X also took the reins in making sure that practically everyone could go to University and get a college-level education. There was a time when a uni degree was sought after by employers and businesses, and those that had one would even be warned not to mention it or else their co-workers would become insanely jealous.

The net result that Generation Y has been left to take up is, only now, growing clear:
ALL of us can get a uni degree, ALL of us have the same basic skills with technology, ALL of us can go for that job, ALL of us are amazing on paper, and ALL of us expect so much more than the generations before us.

In Australia, terms like "dole bludger" can aptly be ascribed to persons who have decided that a maximum value of $3000 in personal assets, including bank-account contents, is OK, and accepting a cheque for $300-$600 each fortnight from the government is only fair and due to them.
I am not of that mold, and I have said before. I wish to work, and desire more than anything else to fill that hole in my heart where a Purpose should be. For us, terms like "job snob" can also be applied somehat aptly, and that is because ALL of us can and have gone to University, graduated with a degree, some even going on to post-graduate studies, and we really do think that toilet-cleaning and junk-mail delivering is beneath us.

The Baby Boomers who refuse to step aside, namely today's politicians and government leaders, prefer to accuse GenY of snobbery in light of our reluctance to put on a cape and mortar-hat, then roll up our sleeves and unpack supermarket boxes. Statements from some politicians, like "my first job was unloading bananas in the markets" are horrendously out of date, because back in the day, when Charlie Chaplin was still contemporary, only the richest or the smartest could go to University.

With all the woderful economic and workplace reforms of the previous generations, as well as the increased life-span thanks to modern medicine, we find generations crowding in upon each other in a severely limited job market. Junk-mail companies will always need stooges to deliver their crap to people's letterboxes, but REAL work, real jobs that supply a meaning or a purpose to a young man or young woman's life, are taken, in short supply, or cluttered with system rorters and nepotistic appointments.

In the old days, a young man would go to school. If he was lucky, he would get through high school. If not, he finished at the mandatory age, and then became a carpenter. If he had some brains, he would continue to University. If he chose a BA, he would be guaranteed work as a school-teacher until such time as he retired or the Reaper came for him. If he chose any other specialisation, he would graduate and start as a junior at an architecture firm, or ad agency, or whatever his specialisation was - or he would stay on for postgrad and become a phD, etc.
If his lungs and liver persisted, he would retire at the ripe age of 55 (yes, FIFTY-FIVE!), and then live off his savings/pension/superannuation until he died at around 70. Anything he had left when the Reaper came would be inherited by his children, to be spent on the eduation of the myriad grandchildren. As successive generations came through the mill, the old man would retire and step aside, or die, and his place would be filled.
For a very brief period of time, somewhere between Kennedy being elected and Kennedy being shot, society had geared itself to accommodate future population growth, by investing in new technologies, utilisation of existing and new resources, and hence jobs were created for future generations of better educated people.

We are NOT living in a golden age now. There is no longer any semblance of opportunity for the average young person, because there are no longer any average young people. High flyers from public high schools, as well as all students from private, well-funded schools, are spotted and treated wonderfully, right into their first corporate position. The underachieving losers in the bottom 5% are given special attention that looks good on paper, only so that their malperformance is not too embarrassing. The other 85% or so wade through with each other, and all come out with uni degrees in some meaningless subject. Technical qualifications are no good unless accompanied by other, more specialised technical qualifications. Arts students are generally derided for their lack of choice, and must return to tertiary education within a handful of years to begin completely re-training themselves.

Throughout it all, Baby Boomers and Generation X maintain whatever positions they already have, and from their perches they stare down at Gen Y and say we are lazy, slack, unmotivated and job-snobs.

It is a curse of exponential population growth that education should increase quantitatively, and at the same time decrease in quality and recognition. In this GenY day, a university degree guarantees you NOTHING AT ALL, but if you don't get it, you are even further behind the pack.

I would long for the days before societal regulation, the days of Generation X adolescence and the post-war amazement of the Baby Boomers childhoods. As a GenY-er, I wake up everyday and say "I have a degree, but I cannot use it for anything." I wonder, more often now than ever since graduation, why I bothered with those three and a half years at Uni at all?

I will sign off no, and drive out in my parents' ex-car, to various shopping centres and supermarkets, and ask the managers for application forms for part-time work. It is all that I can do. I have applied with recruitment agencies, I have applied countless times to online application services to countless government organisations and businesses.
I was lucky enough to work in the tourism industry just before it collapsed here in Australia, and saved up a few thousand dollars. It haemorrages daily, with no end in sight.

I am a GenY university graduate (BA, Political Science/International Relations and Japanese), I speak Japanese, I ahve experience working and living overseas and in four different industries.
And I am going to go stack shelves at the supermarket.

May heaven, or hell, or whoever is left, have mercy on Generation Z, because if this is the boom-time, their lull will be.... apocalyptic?

From The Tominator

2012 - Janus and the Year That Was 2011

Hello once again.
Today is December 31st, and for the first time in my humble life I am going to attend the Sydney Harbour fireworks show in person. Despite being born and raised in Sydney, I have never gone in person! I feel, however, that tonight I will affirm that absence, and also remind myself why I won't be going in the future. I don't mean to sound like it is a bad thing -- I wouldn't be going at all if it were such a horror.
Anyone who has been through Shinjuku Station in Tokyo (and that's a LOT of people) would, to the best of my estimation, feel familiar with Sydney Harbour at this time of year, on this night.
It may not equate to the 7 million+ who pass through Shinjuku daily, but there will be thousands of people - large, Western-fed people, all squashed into the relatively small foreshore of the Sydney Opera House and Circular Quay tonight, for a matter of several hours.

My own year appears to be ending on a significantly higher note than as it started. No, I am not in charge of the Global World Power Organisation just yet, but there have been key gains in key areas that make it worth it.

2011 began, for myself, on a warm night in the Desert. I was in a small group of people whom I didn not know very well, and had little im common with in the traditional sense. I was, of course, not attached, so you can guess what colouring that added to it at the time.
I had been living in the Desert for just over one month back on January 1st, 12am, and it had been a huge change of environment that had followed several other huge shifts and changes through the months preceding.

As it turned out, despite actually living in another country and then in another world (the Desert) for most of 2010, 2011 saw me undertake the greatest amount of travel I've ever done in a calendar year.
2010 was the year of Japan for me, but 2011 was the year of the Homeland, the year I saw Australia.
Starting, as it was, in the Red Centre of Australia, I saw Uluru and the Desert. After the three month plodding (which doesn't bear close examination at this particular point in time), March saw Sydney, April - Alice Springs, May - Melbourne, June - Kings Canyon and Sydney, July - Cairns, August - Kings Canyon and Alice Springs, September - Tokyo and greater Kanto in Japan, October - Osaka, Shikoku, and Tokyo again, November - Canberra, and December - Darwin (for a tropical cyclone near-miss, no less!).
I have covered well over a thousand kilometres of the Earth's surface. And it is only the beginning.

The latter stages of 2011 saw more upheaval similar to its counterpart age in 2010. Crises have snuck up and been faced, and old problems re-ignited, and just as many have been dealt with rather effectively!

I have a good feeling about 2012, and it may well be the end of the world in the sense of an era fading and a new beginning coming forth.

This sounds a little romantic now, as it rightly should on a calendar date as significant as New Years Eve. The late Romans named the month of January for their pagan god Janus, commonly depicted as having two faces - one facing back, and one facing forward. On a date as artificial as New Years Eve and Day, nothing could be more important than to look back at the year that was. Contemplate the lessons learnt, appreciate the solid truth that all of us are born ignorant of everything, and place blame and responsibility where it is necessary, and not where it isn't.

Look forward with the highest aspirations and the greatest ambitions. Foster the most powerful energies from the most profound places in your heart and mind, and jump in with both feet.
The flow of time is still linear for us mere mortals, so looking forward is just as important as peering back.
All of this should be taken with this simple word of caution from the Past:

As you go in with everything you've got, you will not come out of it with all the same. Many things you will lose, many you will replace, and many new material things, ideas, and perspectives you will in fact create along the way. Hard times are coming, and they always will be. Difficulty is a critical part of life. Insurmountablility is always prevalent, because it is an artificial illusion - and artificial illusions are what we use to shade our eyes from the light of reality. It's a human thing.

Enjoy the festivities tonight, and then everyday thereafter. Wallow in the pits of despair, rejoice in the peaks of amazement, and be sure to cover every other range of human emotion along the way.

Adios, 2011. Welcome 2012!

From The Tominator.

I Have A Degree In....

One should sternly question the necessity of attending University in this modern age. I would warn you right here and now, in the second sentence of this blog-post, that if I happen to get any free time to blog in the near future, you are going to read a lot more like this.

I, myself, am a veteran of the Australian academic system. Notice the lack of capitalisation there- it's not "Australian Academic System" or "Australian Academia" or any other iteration with capitals marking each word as important and worth remembering if one ever wished to use a simple intial-abbreviation, like CIA, FBI, or USA, for example.
In fact, except in acutely pretentious situations, there are no capitalisations on any academic institutions on a national or federal scale in the world. (I direct your attention to my use of the words "acutely pretentious", because I know that someone somewhere in the world might think that a thing like 'Ivy League' breaks the trend I am outlining. Come on, now.)

I am, for lack of a better or more impressive postnominal, a BA.
Let me tell you what this means in modern Australia, and you tell me if it is any different where you come from:

There are three basic levels of education, and they are cryptically and deceptively titled as "Primary", "Secondary", and "Tertiary".
"Primary" consists of a grade we call 'Kindergarten', which is a word that not many people are aware as being lifted straight out of the German lexicon, 'kinder' meaning 'child', and 'garten' meaning 'garden'. "Child Garden" should be fairly self-explanitory, but to be sure I should tell you that the whole original point of it was for the little kids to run around in a garden and occasionally learn some hard life lessons, all of which being firmly rooted in the realm of human socialisation. Sadly, as the modern era has slugged along for us with exponential population growth and astonishingly slow adaptation to new situations, our educational departments and social circles have over-analysed what it means to be a kindergartener, and they have deemed it necessary to have a fourth, pre-Kindergarten level in the education timeline. This is something that sickens me, and I don't want to get into it for now. Suffice it for me to say that "Kindergarten" should be running, falling over, and getting familiar with words and numbers.
The rest of "Primary" consists of annually progressive grades that are simply labelled "Year 1", "Year2", and so on up until we reach "Year 6". In all, Primary consists of 7 years. In this time, to cut it very concise, a child develops basic social skills, learns to read and write, basic mathematics, sings, does a range of sports, and may even gain a sense of school spirit, a 'community', if you will.
By the age of 11 or 12 (depending on your birth-month), a regular Australian child should already be more advanced at their core and more spread out across a range of subjects with experience in each, than any human being of any age throughout the Dark Ages!

"SECONDARY" is that time we all loved so much (some of us too much), more commonly referred to as 'high school'. This is perhaps the most complex part of the education system, so I will be converse about it and keep it short.
High School is called "high" school, because once upon a time commoners in the white/Western world could only stand a chance of reaching two levels of education. Primary was the given. Back in the 18th Century and the early 19th century, a person was lucky if they even finished primary school. Only the best and brightest of the commoners went on to high school. And even then, there had to be some grease money going in somewhere.
High School in Australia is a gruelling 6 years, although there have been slow and miniscule steps to change that prison-like period of time. For me, it was daily depression, as my school had no girls (yes, single-sex, all boys...), and it was all 6 years straight. I had no real friends, which made it all the less desireable for me, but I'm sure many people had a gay ol' time there. Pun intended.
These days, around south-western Sydney, there has been an attempt to make what were once High schools of 6 years into a sort of "junior" high school of 4 years, and then all the seniors get shipped to one massive campus for the last two years.
In my day, those last two years were optional, and came under the banner of the HSC (Higher School Certificate), better known by all who undergo it by its general feeling - "the most stressful time in a young person's life". I could devote a whole soliloquy to the HSC, and I probably already have, so not here. The HSC is viewed by 17 and 18 year olds as the most important thing they will ever do. It is high-stress, it is deceptive in that core factor, and it comes at the worst time in a person's developmental cycle. That is because High School is the time of Adolescence.
I don't need to describe it, so I'll just point out that all the negative parts of it, the strange new feelings, the ego problems, the new hygiene issues, and all the rest - they really don't need to be accompanied by a massive exam-slanted period of stress and self-hate. But they are.

"TERTIARY" is what you get to if you survive Adolescence and High School.
Whereas 10 years ago commoners rarely finished Primary, and 50 years ago High School was a given, NOW University, or College, is expected.
In Australia, if you make it through Primary with the ability to read and do the other R's correctly, you get into High School. The years in HIgh school are named "Year 7" up to "Year 12", with Years 11 & 12 being the optional HSC years. If you only made it to Year 10 (the compulsory minimum by law), then hopefully you left school, took up a trade or got a job as a toilet cleaner, and didn't get into drug trafficking. We can only hope, but we know the truth, don't we?
Those of us that got to University all went under the same key assumption: getting my degree will guarantee me some kind of decent job. I know that I went myself with the idea that if I didn't have a degree, I'd never, ever have a shot at getting a decent job in adulthood.
So, I went. So do most Australians. It is, after all, expected. And after the 6 years of high school, and especially the 2 years of HSC, how the hell could you justify not continuing on to get the golden fleece of a Degree?

Universities are, sadly, a relic of a time long forgotten, and very outdated by any modern standard. "University" is a word that has superceded the original lexical "Studium", which meant a place of study, like a stadium is where you do sports. "Studium" does sound rather dull, so the idea of a "Universitae" (from the old Latin) as a community of scholars and thinkers supercede Studium, and that is why we call it that.
University should be a community, yes, and it should be a place where scholars of all ranges of disciplines and diversities can meet and talk and philosophise about human life and the world and the future. "Philo" means love, and "sophy" comes from the Ancient Greek word meaning knowledge. At a University, we should all be Philosophers, and we should all be Enlightened and Rennaisance Men. We should all be versed in multiple disciplines of thought, and using our diversity to work toward common understanding and greater development and advancement of our species - all to the simple end of "getting better".

Again, devilishly simple ideas are the easiest forgotten.

Modern Primary in Australia really consists of 7 years of competition between parents, each comparing themselves and the electronic devices their children have with what's on show in another domicile. Children's lives are neglected in some of the most fundamental ways that you would not believe it -- I myself have learnt some revelations recently that I cannot fully grasp, but I will share with you once I do.
Modern SECONDARY is really more of the same from Primary, just exacerbated by the Adolescence thing, and also by the population growth thing, whereby high school kids are tested in increasingly de-humanising ways and reduced to numbers, largely for fiscal benefits to blase administrators.
Modern Tertiary is a travesty on its own, as Universities, far from being communities of Rennaisance Men and Women, all conversing to understand our universe in ways never before known. Modern Universities are Degree Factories, whose existence depends solely upon annual and mid-annual budgets, penny-pinching and etc etc.
Most Australian Universities are populated by mysteriously wealthy foreigners, mostly from Asia, who have it in their heads that an education in Australia is still better than back in their segmented motherlands. Maybe it is, but that casts a horrible colour on those motherlands.
And the Americans just come here because they can drink from the age of 18, instead of 21 as it is over there.

The Australian education and academic system is a farce, a travesty, and, in the most potent phrase, it is Cheap Whiskey. No self-respecting human being should be subjected to it. Ironically, so human being who is subjected to it can respect himself. ha, ha.

The good news is that with the next looming mega-depression, there is a chance that the whole thing will be rebooted after the Thrid World War, and we might get to see something like the 1960s again.
As a product of the 80s, 90s, and 00s myself, I wouldn't mind some good old fashined fear of nuclear war and real community here and there.

From The Tominator.

President Obama Visits Australia - Good Diplomacy

Greetings, one and all. Today marks an historic occasion. As our local political leaders in Australia have pointed out, this is the fourth time that a President of the USA has come to visit Australia. Barack Obama landed somewhere near Canberra yesterday, spent the night and a state dinner, then visited the Australian War Memorial this morning. Following that, in his motorcade of bullet-proof cars and vans and helicopters, he made the short journey to our Parliament House in Capital Hill. Preceding his speech was the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, who each gave their two cents worth, consisting largely of praises of the past and vague warnings about the future, as Australia and the USA go hand-in-hand all the way, as a matter of course.
It isn't really necessary to go into the similarities and shared values of the histories of these two countries - the politicians have done it for us many times this morning already.
What does bear singling out is certain facts, such as Australia has been with the USA in all military actions since WWII. What does that mean? Depending on who you ask, it is a little, or not a whole helluva lot.
For Australia, it stands as a badge of honour and something that we can engrave across certain memorials, and certainly gives our politicians something to say that sounds great on the surface. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - all these US-led, high-profile actions have had Australia somewhere on the list of also-rans. For the most part, that is what we have been for the USA. From the American perspective, it would be a challenge to ask if any fraction of the Congress or Senate could find Australia on the map, let alone Canberra.

(Canberra, by the way, is the Australian National Capital... just so there is no confusion. It's not Sydney. (And it can't be Melbourne because, despite any promise that city may have, nobody outside of Australia can pronounce the name! A certain death-blow for any aspirations to a city's international significance).)

Geographically, Australia was a beautiful jumping-off point for MacArthur's forces in pushing back Japan during WWII. Now, it would appear, that same factor has brought American attention back to the island-continent.

Let us first admire, though, the nature of a Presidential visit. As has been clearly heralded by our politicians today, Australia has made a point of also-running in all of America's engagements since WWII. I imagine that they are only counting the ones that people officially heard about, because as far as I know (and I DO know about these things) Australia had no part in the Central and South American operations during the Reagan and Bush Snr years. And we didn't do much in Africa, either. But hardly anyone has heard about Pinochet, have they?

These days, and for the last decade or so, US Presidents make routine visits to Europe (usually the ivory halls of Geneva, Zurich, or some other neutral meeting zone for the EU), and of course there is always the odd surprise visit to Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan and Iraq. These places cold be said to hog the Presidential spotlight on a regular basis. The USA is either actively fighting wars, or actively admonishing economic laziness, in most of these places. The current President, Obama, has always been treated like a rockstar in Germany, and once lived in Indonesia, so there would be personal significance to his trips there.
A lot of these places, if not all, would be considered as active (or potential) enemies, or critically weak links in economic chains that the USA needs to stay intact.

Then there is Australia. My birth-country has been, and I mean no real disrespect in saying this, little more than a novelty for the rest of the world.
We exist on the edge of most published maps, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of the gloabl population wouldn't be aware of our existence. When visitors come from places like Japan, they come to see kangaroos, koalas, and to climb Ayers Rock. The rest of the Asian peoples come and fail to leave again, knowing full-well that they can have it better here than back in their backward, cronyistic country. Europeans are neglecting us for sake of their horrific economic management. The Pommies (people from the UK) still come, but almost always have something to complain about. Chinese businessmen (ie the ones who do have it good back home, and don't want to stay) only come to dig out our minerals and natural resources, which we are all too happy to give away at drastically discounted prices, with no real benefit for the people of the nation that is being dug up.
Australia is brought up in conversations among international crowds, and without fail the first topic is the kangaroos and the koalas.
Where, in all the novelty and light-heartedness, is the mention of our reviled "carbon tax"? Our fruitless and bureaucratically mired attempts to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are negligible and unnoticeable to any and all people from overseas. This presents an interestingly home-grown conundrum for Australia's diplomats when they are sent to places like Kyoto and Copenhagen: they ggo to harrass larger, more important nations into switching off their coal-fire power grids, only to be shot down the instant one of the tea-ladies on the other side passes his diplomat a piece of paper that says a fact like "Australia produces more CO2 per capita than anyone else!".

Australia's diplomatic corps is perhaps the most laughable aspect of our country.
Beginning with the objective viewpoint: Australia's achievements mean little; our population is a mere 23 million; we area a relatively stable, long-standing democracy; tourism is a major source of income for us; we have no secondary industries worth mention, and hence no major export markets in that area anymore; our natural resources are finite, and most are going to China; we cannot defend massive coastline or our coastal cities if someone big really did decide to attack us.
These are just some of the base facts about where Australia stands in the world. Imagine that if you were an Australian diplomat yourself, and you knew all this, what kind of internal tortures would be rupturing your innards every day at work.
You probably dreamt of travel and a James Bond-esque lifestyle in the diplomatic corps. Maybe you thought you could rise through the ranks to become Ambassador or High Commissioner for Australia in another country. You thought that you might be handling sensitive material and engageing in top-secret and "save the world" scenarios like those lucky bastards in the CIA or MI5...
None of it can be true, because none of it is possible. Australia's standing in the world is clearly denoted, as anything can be, by the simplest of facts: WHO can pronounce our name?
Just like poor Melbourne festering down there in the state of Victoria, at least 4 hours by car away from anywhere else in the world - the Name has both made the place, and then broken any chance of becoming significant.

"Ahh-stray-li-yahh" and the "Ossseez" that live here are impronounceable, and therefore, stand without a chance. Do not allow yourself to think that all the other aspects of our insignificance are made so by this one factor. Our mispronunciation is not a hinge by any means. I point it out here because I believe that to date no-one has given any credence to this oh-so-simple of ideas.

Change the name? Impossible! Try changing the name of any of your adult children (a metaphor best imagined if you include that your famliy has about 20 kids, and Australia is one of the under-achieving ones who has moved really far away from home (whether he wanted to or not)).

This same factor was again impressed upon us today as Barack Obama gave his historic speech to the Australian Federal Parliament today. Julia Gillard is our dubious Prime Minister, who also happens to be our first female PM (and the story of how it happened should be made into a play or something, resembling Shakespeare's Julius Caesar). Ms Gillard's name should be pronounced "GILL-ard", the capitals stressing emphasis on the first syllable. Obama pronounced it as "gilLARD", and in doing so shot down any ambition she ever had at being taken seriously at APEC or ASEAN or the UN.
If your name is odd to pronounce, you would know what this all means. The John Smiths of this world haven't a clue, and likewise haven't a clue the damage they are doing and propagating every time they mispronounce someone else's name.
As for myself, "Tom" is devilishly simple to utter, so if anyone ever screws it up they are either hopelessly stupid, blatantly disrespectful, or, most likely, both.
My own last name, however, is of Irish origin, and bears odd spelling. Given that many of the old British Empire's old colonies were populated by Irishmen, the white people have little problem with my surname. But anyone not of English-speaking, white-skinned background has a horrible time. There is no disrespect in mispronouncing a person's name the first time it is ever seen on paper. But to do it again and again, over and over, and without even a hint of an attempt to get it right, bears incredible disrespect and perhaps indeed hatred of the person named. The degree would really depend on other factors.
As a former English teacher I am aware, of course, of the practical facts that some people simply cannot pronounce certain sounds and utterances.
I should hope that this was the case behind President Obama's mispronunciation of gilLARD's Proper Noun.
Nonetheless, it is a stalwart reminder of how little Australia really does matter on the world stage.

In 200 years, and 44 Presidents, only FOUR sitting Presidents have visited Australia. In the wake of the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (I&II) and Afghanistan, there have not even been as many Presidential visits as there have been hand-in-hand operations overseas.
Good friends, I am sure, but not equal by any measure. Australia believe is needs the USA, and practically speaking, it does. This was established in WWII, when the UK marooned us out here at the mercy of Japan, to go fight Hitler.
But in this day and age, can the USA really defend us at all? With the numbers of men, materiel, and money that has been blown on the Middle East and lost to China, the answer is a clear "no, there is no help coming".

A depressing thought, to say the least, and one that must be all to clear to our diplomats overseas. There is no James Bond lifestyle, no secret missions, and certainly no chance to rise to the top and be Ambassador to Italy or France. Those top jobs are not awarded on merit or experience, but to stalwart cronies of sitting politicians.
The rest of the Australian diplomatic corps must wander through this waking life both knowing and hinding the painful truth of their own insignificance. Logic may dictate that the diplomatic corps be disbanded, but there must be someone there at ASEAN and the UN to keep the seats warm, and there must be someone at APEC to wear whatever ridiculous traditional garb the host nation brings out.
Those that remain as diplomats in Australia must reconcile truth with illusion, and end up building a fortified wall of arrogance around themselves. We all know that arrogance is based upon fundamental weakness and insecurity, and that arrogance increases in direct proportion to that weakness. Australia's diplomats are the most insecure of all, as they are all graduates of universities like ANU, Sydney, or UNSW, and have all spent at least four years of their life studying the (truthfully) fascinating world of international relations - or maybe some just did law - and have become the cream of the crop of BA graduates in Australia. They then move to their plush cubicles at DFAT in Canberra, and proceed to freeze out the horrible winters in that city as the rest of the world freezes them out for their insignificance.

Kevin Rudd, former PM of Australia, is a stellar example of such a diplomat, one who has risen to the top of the heap, even got to PM, and is now Foreign Affairs Minister.
When Barack Obama cancelled two previously planned visits to Australia, KRudd was the PM, and both times he was positively wetting himself at the idea of the most popular President in recent history visiting Australia on his watch.
The Shakespearean deception that led to his downfall saw him take a position that was painfully on the sidelines. While PM gilLARD led President Obama out of the house of Representatives, KRudd could only manage a handshake, and perhaps two seconds more of the President's attention than any of the other 200 plus politicians who were fawning over Obama today.
You could practically see the knife sticking out of KRudd's back, and the daggers he was staring at gilLARD as she led the President on and out of the chamber.

Barack Obama was the Great Melato Hope for the USA, in the aftermath of Bush's disastrous regime of ignore-and-dictate politics.
His reputation has been damaged, to say the least, by his incessant following of Bush's policies, and all too apparent lack of progress in changing anything of import inside the USA, or in the wider world.
Today, Obama stressed that one of the reasons he even came to Australia was to prop up the US security presence in the Asia-Pacific region. I admire is forwardness in mentioning it. However, neither Obama nor anyone else in that big, green room was willing to actually say the name of the new great enemy-in-waiting - China.
Today, in fact as I write this blog post, Obama is flying to Darwin. (Darwin is a city you've never heard of, located on the extreme north of the continent, somewhere near the middle of the coast). Darwin, a city of well under half a million, was once slated to be the "gateway to the world", but never progressed beyond an oversized country town. It's geographical location, however, is absolutely PERFECT for a new US military base to be built, signifying a dagger to be aimed at China in the near future. With the rise of China, Australia will become to the USA what Cuba was to the USSR. We have the entire continent to play with, though.

China is the growing superpower, we all know it, but damned if we will say it.
It is always funny to see politicians skirt around actually saying a certain word, but forcefully alluding to it.

All I can say for now is that our diplomats, wonderful, amazing, fantastic university graduates that they are, will be positively buzzing with pride and bubbling over in their arrogance in the years to come, as Austrlaia assumes its role as junkyard dog in the coming tensions between the USA and China.
Will our historic and close friendships and alliances hold? What reason have they?
I'll let the wonderful people at our universities figure that out. That is if that are not all totally engaged in finance.

From The Tominator.

Qantas pt 2 - Modern Australian Capitalism

Hello again, my friends!
Before you read this post, I strongly urge you to read the precursor, entitled "Qantas pt 1: A Corporation We Can Be Proud Of", for important background information that is in no way coloured with sarcastic leadings.

And now, for our Feature Presentation:

Of late, Qantas finds itself in a bit of a pickle regarding industrial relations. I have deigned it best to tell you the details chronologically:
Back in September 2011, if memory serves me right, the pilots of Qantas bad a beef with the management of the corporation. That beef centred on a dream that management had of laying off Australian-based pilots, and outsourcing pilot jobs to foreign workers. This dream came in the wake of a previously realised dream of outsourcing engineering work on Qantas aircraft to foreign hangars and engineering crews.
One statistic that Qantas lords over all the other airliners in existence is its impeccable flying safety record. Apparently no Qantas has ever dropped out of the sky. This is, in all honesty, a remarkable accomplishment, and make Qantas the only airliner in the world to give recognisable creedence to Superman's assertion about flying being the safest mode of transport.
But Qantas is a corporation, at its core. It is therefore prone to the same emotional moodswings that all economic bodies are.
During the 2008-09-10-11 global economic meltdown, Qantas has, against all odds, managed to turn out a "profit" of something in the neighbourhood of AU$534million. Again, amazing! And in the climate of this Great Recession, tthe top brass of Qantas has convinced its shareholders that the best use of this magic-money is..... aggressive international expansion!
Yes! In a global climate of seemingly endless decline and socialist capitalism (we can talk about that oxymoron later), Qantas thinks that now is a good time to expand into new frontiers.
Yes, I can see that the iron is hot where past competitors are failing - we must STRIKE there now! But airliners exist in the most vulnerable industry - a SARS epidemic in Asia can ground planes globally for indefinte periods. Ash-clouds from impronouncable Icelandic volcanoes can cease all air traffic in and out of Europe. Terrorist whackos can, with the mere hint of an attack, force draconian security measures and endless, rolling cancellations and delays on the common traveller. One would think that, having experienced all these fiascoes in the last 5 years would give the Qantas brass some pause, to think that perhaps aggressive expansion into Asia and beyond could be waylaid until more stable economic times. Maybe just stash a few million dollars in the mattresses in case another volcano erupts, bird falls ill, or nutjob sends a video to Al-Jazeera...

These days, $534 million Australian is a LOT of money! That's about US$572million!
For those who think that "growth", as a term in economics, has not lost all its meaning (with the incessant mutual find advertising!!!! Oh my GOD! "I generate wealth through manageable growth" - what does that even MEAN anymore????), the best use of that kind of moola in the modern age is to blow it on Asian subsidiaries.
We could sit back and analyse where the cash came from. I'm not going to to do that now, but I will say that it is not reflective of increased patronage - economy is still bad, and the service is still fucking lousy - and it is not the result of great new products or marketing. This figure can only be attributed to cost-cutting and "razor-ganging" in all the places possible inside the corporation. Such cost-cuts could easily be attained by ceasing costly-yet-effective Australian engineering, and repacing it with cheap-and-nasty foreign (Asian) engineering on the aircraft.
It could be continued and stabilised if the pesky Australian pilots, protected by their loud unions and their fairer industrial relations legislation were replaced with cheaper foreign-based pilots.

And we know all of this. It is not, after all, any of it NEW, is it?

And hence Qantas has come to show us the true meaning of modern Australian capitalism.
Qantas shareholders have agreed that the above-described cost-cutting measures are critcally necessary for survival. Alan Joyce, a leprechaun who currently sits as Qantas CEO, has been vocal in his attempts to make what Qantas is doing to sound a though it is not un-Australian.
Mr Joyce gets paid AU$2.92million for his troubles at the helm of Qantas. That was until recently.
Recently, starting with the pilot dispute, Qantas staf in all sectors: pilots, security, flight attandants, baggage handlers - all of them- have begun striking over wages and working rights/conditions. In the last month, Qantas has made the headlines most days for another rolling strike which has directly affected tens of thousands of passengers globally.
I myself was affected back on September 19th, when, after 10 months living in the Desert, I was finally scheduled to fly out and away back here to Sydney. I was delayed by three hours for "mechanical problems", but we all know the truth. My suffering was relatively minor, when compared to what the poor bastards flying Qantas are going through this very minute, as I write this long-winded blog entry! This afternoon, Allan Joyce (the leprechaun) announced that in response to the strikes by Qantas ground staff at major Australian airports, Qantas is grounding its entire domestic and international fleet. Condolences and appeasments have been offered to the 60,000 or so who have been stranded across the globe.
Why did he do it? --The answer plays like a bad soap opera:
- Joyce grounds all global services because the strikes at home are causing problems. Problems estimated at around $15million-worth daily.
- Joyce blames the workers for striking and purposefully causing disruptions to the company's operations.
- The Transport Workers Union (TWU, or 'tee-triple-yoo' as I like to call it) blames Joyce and the brass of Qantas for not paying wages accordingly with the massive profits Qantas made in the last year. Some of that $534million ought to be dished out to the workers that made it possible, right?
- Joyce and the shareholders have remained insistent and steadfast on their expansion plans, and the shareholders have made it very clear when, just the other day, at the AGM, they awarded Mr Joyce a 70% pay rise, yes, SEVENTY PER CENT PAY RISE, to thank him for his troubles. He now gets $5.01million annually for his time and effort. Apparently the majority of Qantas stockholders are fine with the fact that Joyce's terrible management is running Qantas into the ground.
- Taking umbrage to the outrage that is the CEO's pay rise, the TWU staged sit-ins and further strikes today, which prompted the global grounding.

And read the next few sentences, children, to find out how you, too, can get paid $5million annually (with stock options added on, of course):
If ever you are faced with widespread industrial revolt, hold firm to your original, inflammatory decree of sqaundering earlier profits, accuse the workers of causing disruptions and lost earnings, and, then, in a master-stroke of genius leadership, steal the knife from the workers' hands and ground your entire global aircraft fleet unilaterally!
That's multi-million dollar thinking!

Of course, Joyce has made his warnings that "if this goes on any longer, it will mean jobs" - quoted here almost verbatim, and still conveying the stong sense of balls-lessness that the threat was originally delivered with. Just come out and say it: "get back to work or you're all FIRED!".

And so, what we are left with here, today, on this 29th night of October, 2011AD, is a standoff: a creepy leprechaun of a CEO and faceless and money-grubbing shareholders on the one side, and an equally balls-less union and legion of casually-employed baggage handlers on the other.

What happens next is anyone's guess. The Federal Opposition, the Liberal Party, is gesticulating that the sitting Labor government should get involved. The Liberal Party is our
socially conservative, "liberal business" and small government party, by the way.

One thing is for sure: unless Qantas offers me one HELLUVA flight deal next time I depart, and I am convinced they won't be cancelling my flight, I will never fly with Qantas again.
I'll take my faux-swiss watchband from the Frequent Flyer points store and leave them in the dust.

Qantas has come a long way from Longreach, rural Queensland. And it has proven the modern Australian capitalism has finally matched its counterpart in the USA. Once again, Tony Montana said it best when he said: "You know what Capitalism is? Gettin' FUCKED!"

Adios, my readership. And Good Night.

From The Tominator.

Qantas pt1 - A Corporation We Can Be Proud Of

Evening, everyone.
As the majority of my readership is foreign-born, I must being by asking if you are aware of what "Qantas" is?
"Shouldn't that be spelt with a 'u', Tominator?" I hear you ask immediately, being the grammatically acute adepts that you are.
Yes, indeed, so the rule would imply. But Qantas does not need to follow the rules.
As the legend goes:
Once upon a time, in a remote, dusty (sandy) town in central Queensland, Australia, called "Longreach", there was a need for getting to anywhere else. In those heady days of the early 20th century, airliners had finally come into existence, and so it was established in Longreach, Qld; an aeiral service that would move passengers and possibly freight between Queensland and the Northern Territory. 'Twas to be called the "Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Service". Take the heads off each of those words and you get...... QANTAS!

Although capitalism in Australia had not yet reached the true "fuck you" spirit it had in the USA, throughout the 20th Century QANTAS became the premier airliner of choice for Australians, and most importantly for Australians and their family who were still based back in the UK. At one point abbreviated further to "QEA" (Qantas Empire Airways), Qantas established the "Kangaroo Route", a multi-stop route between Darwin and London that could have you back in your loved-ones' freezing London flat in just under a week. This is a hell of an improvement over the 4 month journey the First Fleet of settlers and convicts took to get to Australia in 1778.

In short, Qantas rose above several other competitors and withstood the test of time to become not only the Australian carrier of choice, but important and prevalent enough to adopt the motto: "The Spirit Of Australia", and avoid any kind of smirkish rebuke from the Australian public.

In what appears to me to be a unique aspect of Australian culture, we identify with certain commercial brands and stick with them much longer than regular capitalism would usually dictate. Vegemite "Australia's favourite", BHP "the big Australian", Qantas "the spirit of Australia" - we have much more than the one brand that has been stamped across the psyche of Australian denizens, and we cling to them. I will admit that my experience abroad is not as broad as I would like it to be, so I cannot say that selling the country's soul to one giant corporation per sector is truly unique to Australia.

Personally, I am a Frequent Flyer with Qantas. To date, with several trips between Sydney and Ayers Rock and Japan, I have amassed a whopping 30,000 points. This is enough to buy me half a Fossil watch, or a miniature outdoor BBQ from the Qantas online store. After the thousands of (Australian!) dollars I have spent on flights with mediocre-to-poor service across the country and the mighty Pacific, I am proud to say that my beloved program rewards me so much.

Yes, my people, Qantas is a coporation that we can all, as Australians, be truly proud of. It is companies like this that make is proud to be Australian, and I am sure that if those of you reading whom were born abroad knew anything about this company, it makes you want to BE Australian now!

Stay tuned for Part II, where I explain the delicate handling of the current Industrial Relations Firestorm that is currently engulfing Qantas.