Election 2010

Last Saturday I helped out at one of the polling booths for the Federal Election – the one at Putney Primary School for the division of Bennelong to be precise. I never used to be interested in politics; maybe thinking about having kids puts one in the frame of mind of thinking about the socio-economic environment we live in. And then of course there was the National Broadband Network.

I got roped into it because the officer-in-charge, one of my wife’s colleagues at the Salvo’s, was worried that they’d be short staffed and Jenny and a couple of her other colleagues agreed to sign up. Several more people turned up than were expected, maybe about 15 of us in total (not including the party spruikers outside), but that ended up being a blessing in disguise.

Jenny and I, and a guy named Charles were in charge of the Declaration votes – kinda like the “odd jobs” queue for people from other electorates, people whose names weren’t on the official roster, etc. The day started at around 7:15am when we arrived to help with the final set up of the booth (most of it had already been done the previous night by the officer-in-charge). People already started rocking up by about 7:30am, wanting to get the chore out of the way and not realising that polling didn’t begin until 8am.

So when we unlocked the doors, there was already a queue of people. Throughout the morning, the queue just kept growing and growing, to the point that it snaked its way out from the entrance out onto the street. I’m not 100% sure how many people there were in total, but judging by the count (more about that later), we would’ve processed in excess of 3,000 that day. The polls were open for 10 hours (from 8am – 6pm), which means that we processed on average 5 people a minute. The queue was long through most of the day and we had a lot of people who were irate at having spent half an hour or more minutes waiting in line. It only relented sometime around 5 – 5:30pm. It was a good thing that we had the extra hands otherwise none of us would’ve been able to take a break.

Speaking of breaks, after 6pm, there were none. The counting process began immediately after polling closed, with the spruikers coming in from outside to act as “scrutineers”. They themselves were not allowed to touch the ballot papers; only to watch and ensure that nothing improper happened during the counting of the House of Representative ballot papers (not sure why they didn’t bother with the Senate). On our part, the three of us “Dec’s” sorted through the votes cast for the other electorates, to be sent on for inclusion in their final tallies. After all that was done, the whole team went on to count and sort the “tablecloths”. The above-the-line votes had to be counted towards the primary vote, but the below-the-line would presumably be sent somewhere for computers to determine the 2-party preferred calculations.

Jenny says that she saw at least one obligatory penis drawing in amongst the informals (the ones where the voter didn’t provide a valid vote); I didn’t come across any – not that I’m disappointed or anything; just surprised at how well behaved people were overall. Then again, we were in Putney and not some boganville out West. Counting continued until at least 10pm, and the sorting, securing and packing until nearly 11pm. All I remember of the counting was that for the Senate, our location recorded 1500+ for the Liberals, against 720 for Labor. I can’t remember how many the Greens got, not that it mattered anyway. It was clearly Liberal all the way for the good folk of Bennelong.

On Sunday, we rested. And rested. I never would’ve imagined that it’d be possible to get that tired from sitting down all day, and sorting through bits of paper all night. For all that, we got paid $339.83 for the day itself, and $51.14 for the online training that we had to complete prior to the day – before tax. Was it worth it? Not for the money, that’s for sure. It was an interesting and highly educational experience, but not one that I’m keen to repeat again.

In this election, think more broad(band)ly

Of all the major policies being debated in Australia’s 2010 election, it should be of no surprise that my interest lies mainly with the building of a National Broadband Network (NBN). In a nutshell, last year the Labor government kicked off a large-scale infrastructure project to build a nationwide network of fibre-optic cables capable of carrying telecommunications traffic at much higher speeds than the existing copper-based network that our phones and internet run on. If Liberal wins, they have pledged to stop work on it immediately, and instead adopt a vastly inferior approach.

Before your eyes glaze completely over, let me quickly say that even though the other issues might be more important to you in regards to how you vote, give me this opportunity to explain why you should give at least a passing thought to the NBN.

Who cares about the Internet?
By virtue of the fact that you’re reading this blog, I’m probably preaching to the converted. However I’m sure that you can think of family, friends and colleagues who think that going online is all about porn, spam, and time wasting. Online services (not simply the Web) are helping to transform society for the better. Have they tried submitting their tax return via e-tax and getting their refund promptly within 14 days? Do they know that they can talk to family and friends around the globe for free using Skype? Missed a show on TV and used a site like ABC iView to catch it there instead? The Internet isn’t about just the Web any more, and resist it all you like, but it’s quickly becoming an integral part of our lives.

Do we need more speed?
All of those things are available today, so what’s the NBN going to deliver that we can’t already get? In today’s terms, nothing. The issue is not, and should not be about speed. It’s about how efficiently we can move data around in a society and economy increasingly dependant on information. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google loves to rattle off the statistic that every 2 days, we are creating as much information as all of humankind has ever generated from between the dawn of time up until 2003.

It’s not even relevant what the information is: news, entertainment, business, and even non-human readable information such as farm-to-fork tracking of food, the future holds a tsunami of data that needs the capacity to carry it. A helpful but imperfect analogy would be traffic congestion. As our population grows and more and more cars appear, our limited road infrastructure would need to be upgraded by building more and bigger roads. Unfortunately there’s a physical limitation – there just isn’t any space. But because fibre doesn’t take any more room than copper wire, it’s as if you could turn a 2-lane street into a 16-lane freeway without it taking up any extra space.

Can’t it wait until later?
We need to consider that the infrastructure being built is not for today, or even the near future – the NBN won’t even be completed until the next decade. Our current copper network has served us well since the first trunk linking Sydney and Melbourne was laid back in 1907, with the remainder of the country wired up at significant expense to the Commonwealth of Australia by the Postmaster General, through ’til 1935.

The PMG position is a Federal Ministerial post, overseeing the Postmaster-General’s Department that was in charge of all domestic telephone, telegraph and postal services. With 16,000 staff, it accounted for 90% of the new federal bureaucracy. That figure went up to over 120,000 staff (around 50% of the federal bureaucracy) by the late sixties. (Source)

Pause to think about that for a moment. The building of the original telecommunications network accounted for between 50 – 90% of what we would today call “the government” of its time. But I digress.

Building the NBN is still predominantly physical work and will take a long time time to wire up the whole country, so whether we start now, next year, or next decade, the longer we put this project off, the further into the future it will be before we can start reaping the benefits of the NBN.

What about the cost?
The other massive stumbling block for opponents of NBN is the cost. There are so many misconceptions about it that I don’t have any hope of addressing them all here without burying you in gory technical details, but two huge points are:

• The $43 billion figure constantly being thrown around is not one big huge lump-sum of taxpayers’ money, payable to NBN Co. up front. It is spread out over 8 years, and consists of a combination of taxpayer dollars (around $26-30bn roughly) and the sale of government bonds to private investors.
• $43bn represents 3.85% of Australia’s annual gross domestic product, which averaged over 8 years is half-a-percent per year. We’re investing 0.5% of our country’s economic wealth into building the digital backbone of the future.

Still think it’s expensive? There’s more, but I don’t want to bore you with details on why the Coalition’s scare campaign is severely misguided. For that, I will simply point you in the direction of one Mr Ross Gittins.

The money could be better used elsewhere
A person could say this about any policy that one disagrees with. Faster rail links between cities? Don’t travel. More hospital beds? Fit as a fiddle. Paid parental leave? Already had five, can I give one back? It’s the moral high ground, and since no individual is going to agree with the way in which every single dollar is spent in this country – the arts, community building, welfare, etc. – it’s plain douche-baggery to object on the grounds that the funds should be spent on something else.

The government can’t be trusted to deliver on time, on budget
True. You got me there. But let me leave you with this quote, from Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Hearld:

[Tony Abbott] may not consider the potential long-term economic benefits to the nation. But his single-minded devotion to the enormous costs involved in the project at least has one major benefit. It will focus the minds of those whose task it is to roll out the network to make sure it is achieved with utmost efficiency.

Toying around with creativity

I’ve written here about my Transformers collection, but you may wonder what do I do with them exactly, other than putting together elaborate displays in my cabinet. To be honest, nothing; they largely gather dust (and are horribly difficult to clean, I might add). I had an epiphany the other day that the difference between me now as an adult and me back when I was a child: I no longer give myself the freedom to imagine.

Over the weekend I played with Jenny’s cousin’s son, a hyperactive two year old. Both my body and my mind received a thorough workout as we roughed up a stack of Jenga blocks, where the individual tiles were transformed into a pile of bricks, a horde of money, food, cars, trains and planes. Next, we moved onto an etch-a-sketch, where we drew faces, created scenes of day and night, and drew a whole lot of random scribbles from which we’d eke out meaning, like a Rorschach test. We did the same with his collection of toy cars as well as his Thomas the Tank Engines of various sizes (which somehow came to represent members of his family). Overall, about 2 hours of intense play.

It was like the opening scene of Toy Story 3 – toys aren’t simply objects to be appreciated for their features and design – they were avatars for the personalities and characters that we invent for them in our imaginations. As embarrassing as it is for me to admit this, I used to play with Transformers in the same way that girls played with dolls. I distinctly remember one Transformer called “Searchlight” that I used to play with a lot, for whom I built a little bed out of a tissue box for him to sleep at night.

As an adult, I no longer afford myself the opportunity to truly play with toys. My limit is putting them into spiffy poses and taking a photograph or two – any more than that and I’d probably be committed. The generally accepted adult expressions of creativity are things like this:

That’s great if you have the passion and the talent, but what do you do if you don’t?

Don’t you myth the old days?

I’ve spent many a word in this series criticising the various problems with atheism, so you’re probably starting to wonder by now: if organised religion is so good why did you bother leaving in the first place? A valid point, so let me turn my critical eye in the other direction for a moment:

Ever wonder why it’s so strange that we have 365.25 days in a year? What if I told you that God originally designed a year to be 360 days, and that it started getting longer and longer ever since Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Using the latest supercomputer models of our solar system, scientists have discovered that if you wind the clock back until a year equalled 360 days exactly, it would be… you guessed it, approximately 6,000 years ago – exactly the age that Theologians calculated the age of the Earth to be, and exactly what the bible says!

That’s not all! It’s no coincidence that 360 is the number of degrees in a circle; it is the smallest number divisible by everything from 1-10 (except 7 of course, which is the Holy Number); and it’s also the sum of two squares (a number multiplied by itself): 6 and 18. 18 divided by 6 is… three! The number of the holy trinity! And so on…

(Now if you don’t forward this to 10 of your friends, you will suffer from really, really, excruciatingly bad luck for the next hojillion years)

Look familiar? Well it shouldn’t, because I made it up. It took all of about 15 minutes worth of writing and Wikipedia “research” to create something similar to the stuff that we regularly receive in our inboxes. Here’s an example of one that I didn’t make up: the one about the supposed “missing” Christian verse in our national Anthem, Advance Australia Fair:

With Christ our head and cornerstone,
We’ll build our Nation’s might.
Whose way and truth and light alone
Can guide our path aright.
Our lives, a sacrifice of love
Reflect our Master’s care.
With faces turned to heaven above
Advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia fair!

It’s a nice verse, and while it has been around for some time, there’s no historical evidence to support the claim that this was written by the song’s original composer, Peter Dodds McCormick. What’s bad is the army of zealots who twist this into a claim that malicious forces are trying to censor the country’s Christian heritage. Um, the Christian heritage of a nation that started out as a penal colony?

I’m often astounded when a believer, who denounces numerology, astrology and other forms of spiritual mysticism, carelessly forward these messages on to friends and family. It’s but one symptom of an affliction suffered by all humans, but especially acutely by people of faith: confirmation bias, where one lets their guard down for anything that aligns with ones’ own beliefs, and puts it up for that which does not.

These are the myths that modern-day religion is built upon – the “spiritual food” that I used to gorge myself with, desperate for a true supernatural experience which never came. Despite all earnestness and no matter how much I followed the prescribed methods during my time as a Christian, I ultimately failed to have a genuine spiritual encounter. And that’s why I quit looking for Truth in religion – it’s riddled with distractions that do nothing more than tax ones’ ability to detect bullshit. If only religious institutions could just accept that what they can offer, compassion and community, is far greater than the spiritual benefits that they promise but can’t deliver.

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This post is part of the series An Atheist in God’s Kingdom.

Preachy scribe: a git’s lame blog rant

A bit over a year ago I had a crazy idea: if I start writing book reviews and attach affiliate links to Book Depository at the end of each one, people will buy them and I’ll get rich off commissions! Thus GeekReads was born. Like all harebrained schemes born of greed, the idea fell flat and destroyed any delusions I had of blogging my way to fame and fortune.

However, GeekReads remains, and has instead become the home for my thoughts and opinions on popular entertainment – movies, games, Web comics, etc. What there isn’t very much of any more is book reviews, ‘coz the only time I get to read is while riding the Porcelain Express, and that only gets me through a few pages a day at best. Hence source material is a bit scarce (except maybe when I’ve gone and eaten something old and dodgy out of the fridge).

While trying to think of a new name, I had the idea of using the Internet Anagram Server (I, Rearrangement Servant) to see if I could make something clever by rearranging the letters of cyberseraphic. Amazingly, there are 5,231 possibilities (in comparison to a mere 1,361 for “Caesar Wong” and one single measly entry for “Jenny Wong”). Most of them are gibberish, but it’s bloody funny gibberish; just seeing “preachy scribe” had me in hysterics, being an almost-too-perfect description for this blog. I think I have way more fun than is normal for a person scanning through a list of words.

Still no viable alternatives for GeekReads, but if I wanted to create some dodgy sites I could go with “Cheery Bra Pics”, “Yep, barer chics” or even “Her Racy Biceps” for the extra kinky types. On a more wholesome note I could do a cutesy blog called “Peach Berry (sic)”, or while we’re on the fruit theme, how about a property website called “Peachy Cribs RE (Real Estate)”? Food blogs tend to be growing in popularity – I could call mine “Chars by recipe” or “Spicy crab here”. What about sports commentary “by epic archers”… we could be here all day.

In case you’re still scratching your head wondering, the second part of the post title isn’t “Gorillas get Batman”, “Install garbage, Tom” or “Algebra maligns tots”, but a rearrangement of “blog title’s anagram”.