Australia: News and Views

I’ve been searching for information on Waitangi Day celebrations in Perth, or even Waitangi Day celebrations in Sydney or in fact Waitangi Day celebrations in Australia - and I am surprised - the Internet has failed me - there really doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest by New Zealanders celebrating Waitangi Day in Australia.

There best resource I found was the Maori in Oz site which lists a number of hangi and picnics  in the Gold  Coast, Sunshine Coast but nothing even in Sydney? I can’t believe that with the Kiwi population in Sydney there must be a Waitangi Day celebration!

For those who don’t know - Waitangi Day is New Zealand’s national day celebrated on the 6 February it marks the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the Maori and the British Crown.

In New Zealand celebrations have been somewhat controversal - often marry by protestors who would like to see more Maori soverignity (hint guys - try hanging out in Australia for a while - its a whole lot worse here!) so as a white New Zealander I generally view Waitangi Day as a paid holiday - or when I was a kid - a bit of nuisance as you had normally just gone back to school!

Maybe Waitangi Day and Australia Day should merge? Australia Day is sensibly always a Monday and generally still in the school holiday.s  I noticed when researching this piece that many expat communities further away than Australia do just that have a combined Australia- Waitangi Day celebration - normally on one of theSaturdays between the 25 January and the 6 Feburary - that’s quite  a good idea if you think about it. …

Photo Credit 

There is talk that the crazy TSA restictions on liquids will be eased in 2009 Australians, as well as other nationalities who are supposed to have “visa free” access to the US now have to pre-register on a website before flying!   According to the US Embassy in Canberra :

Visa Waiver Program (VWP) enables nationals of certain countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K., to travel to the United States for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without obtaining a visa, if certain requirements are met. Under the VWP, time spent in Canada, Mexico, and adjacent islands counts towards the maximum of 90 days stay allowed under the program. However, all VWP travellers will soon need to register in advance.

OK this is the visas waiver program - why on earth do I have to apply on-line to apply for  that? Isn’t that why we have passpors and security at the airport before I even leave Australia?

If you check out the link -then this requirements goes from the weird to just plain stupid - first you have to enter all the information already encoded on your passport, and transmitted on check-in to US immigration, and then your airline details - also presumably available online. And then you answer the normal silly questions about whether you are carrying sexually transmitted diseases, whether you have ever been arrested (not just convicted, arrested - forget innocent until proven guilty in the land of the free) for “crimes of moral turpitude”

Apparently moral turpitude includes:

Such offenses generally involve conduct which is inherently base, vile, or depraved and contrary to the accepted rules of morality and the duties owed to persons or society in general

Ooops does skipping church for 20 years count? What about living in sin with my partner? Are you sure these aren’t the entry rules for Iran or Saudi Arabia?

The thing that really annoys me though is the arrogant assumption that Canada, Mexico and “adjacent islands”, whatever they might be (Russia? Cuba?) are somehow under the US immigration control. If you want to transit LA on the way to a 6-month stay on a valid visa in Canada - you are not eligible - even though you  may only be in the airport for a few hours and ever other country in the world would give you a transit visa.

The following is circulating - not sure if was written by an American:

Dear World:
We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of the
ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008
interruption in service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year
service outage has been located, and the software responsible was
replaced November 4. Early tests of the newly installed program indicate that we are now operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional on January 20. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage. We look forward to resuming full service and hope to improve in years to come. We thank you for your patience and understanding.
Sincerely,
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

one just hopes that it actually turns out to be true.

My local newspaper has been full of outrage at the closure of the Ravensthorpe mine by BHP. The nickle mine only opened last year and was expected to have a mine life of 30 years. Now its closed - with only a few days notices. The town is ruined, the businesses that were encouraged to move there are ruined! The people who moved there and bought houses there are ruined! etc etc.

Well there is more to the mne closure than the story about falling nickle prices - it is likely that the plant was never operating anywhere near capacity and that the metallurgy was more difficult than expected.

But that’s another post - people quite bloody whinging - you sound like a bunch of POMS!

The reality is that even if you had started work the day before the mass lay-offs at BHP’s Ravensthorpe mine you would have received 18 weeks redundancy pay! Yes you read that right - and yes that is around  4.5 months pay for turning up for one day. Those with 2 year’s service will get 6 months pay.

But we up-rooted our families to move here! But we gave up well-paying jobs to move here! So what - this is the nature of mining - if you want a stable job go teaching or nursing or work in a funeral parlour. Mining has its ups and downs- that’s why it pays so well!

Well some supermarket let you you scan your own groceries at the check out and some visitors to Australia can already self-check themselves into the country. Smartgate is the technology which allows travellers with e-Passports to process themselves through border control.

The Smartgate system was intially trialled in Adelaide, Cairns, Brisbane and Melbourne which will extend soon to Perth and Sydney. At the moment Smartgate are resrticted to Australian and New Zealand passport holders who have the new e-Passports (distinguished by the small gold “chip” logo on the front cover).

By June 2009, Customs expects to start to widen the use of Smartgate to people of other nationalities who are carrying an e-Passport.

The Smartgate technology using face-recognition technology to confirm a match between the person and the photo scanned onto the data strip in the passport.

Western Australia goes to the polls to vote on the controversial daylight saving referendum. The poll will be held on 16 May 2009, after a three year trial on daylight saving in WA.

The referendum is compulsory - at the debate is still alive and well as to whether WA should put their clocks forward from late October to late November.

To me, coming from New Zealand  this debate is so last century - right up there with the antiquated shop trading hours (no shopping on Sunday here!).

After all without daylight saving it would be dark by 7pm - its dark by 8pm even WITH daylight savings. In fact in my not so humble opinion is that WA needs to change their entire timezone!

The Poll  also highlights the inequalities of the Australian voting system. Voting in the referendum is compulsory - but ONLY Australian citizens can vote. Now Perth has a lot of immigrants - most of us from countries such as NZ, South Africa and the UK - most of us under the age of 50 can’t recall a time without daylight saving. We’d all vote for it - but we’d have to be citizens first - not just permanent residents!

If, as looks likely, Western Australians vote against daylight savings then WA will be 3 hours behind Sydney and the Eastern States - meaning 6am starts for some business owners!

Well the nominations are announced for the 2009 Academy awards and Australia has been snubbed in all but one category. Although it has been known for a while that neither Hugh Jackman or Nicole Kidman weren’t in the running, it was tipped that the visual effects team for Australia would get something and that Brandon Walters had a chance at best supporting actor.

The only good news is that Catherine Martin has been nominated for the best costumes in Australia.  So what is not to like about the movie? I’m off to see it this Australia Day long weekend.

Did you know that Sir Elton John had done a special ballad for the movie Australia?

Australia Day is coming up on the 26 January and apparently along with the traditional approaches to the day which is about partying and fireworks - Australia Day is a big movie going weekend.  The theory is that it will give a big boast to Baz Luhrman’s Australia movie as patriotic audiences flock to see the movie on the big screen.

Although the Australia movie has been pretty much universally panned by the critics its been doing alright in the box office- shows what they know eh!

The film has taken $32.7 million since it was released in November - making it the third-highest takings in eight weeks by Australian films (still behind Crocodile Dundee and Babe).

According to 20th Century Fox - the Australia film’s distributers the Australia Day long weekend is traditionally a big movie-going weekend - and of course - going to Australia or Australia Day has ring to it - you could do that even if you weren’t in Australia!

And here’s a nice photo of the Australia Day fireworks over the Swan River in PerthI’d like to say I took  if I had a nice camera, a tripod, and patience, the credit is below!

Photo Credit

Brandon Walters looks likely to go all the way on his fist acting job. The unknown Aborgine boy who play’s Nullah in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia is now being widely tipped to be get the supporting actor role in the 2009 Academy awards. An Oscar for the 13-year old would be a fairy tail ending for the Brandon Walters who was discovered when Baz Luhrmann saw him playing at a local Broome swimming pool.

Brandon Walters would be the youngest Academy Award nominee for the 2009 Oscars if he got the nomination for his role as Nullah in Australia.

Apparently Nicole Kidman and  Hugh Jackman have both played a role in protecting young Brandon from the media spotlight, which the young Aboriginal actor is probably not ready to handle.

In the movie Australia Nicole Kidman plays the part of Nullah’s adoptive mother and it seems that she has continued with this role in the publicity lead up to the films release and now to the Academy awards. It looks like she has little chance of an Oscar, while Brandon Walters may bag his Oscar in his first role!

ANZAC Day is for me, and I guess for a lot of Australians under 50, just another public holiday. For those of you who are not Australians- ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand is the 25 April – and commemorates one of Australia and New Zealanders greatest military defeats.at Gallipoli, in modern day Turkey, was a disaster of military planning by the British, but is was the ANZACs (Australia New Zealand Army Corp) who bore the brunt of the casualties in 1915.

Occurring just 15 years after the birth of the Australian nation ANZAC Day has come to be a time to remember the dead of all wars and is traditionally marked by dawn services and marches.

In 2009 April 25 is a Saturday and the only States which will give people the paid holiday on Monday 27 April are Western Australia and the ACT. All other Australian states and New Zealand will lose the paid holiday (unless they are routinely working on Saturdays).

The RSL and other returned servicemen associations don’t seem to have a problem with this. Explaining that the only reason for the holiday is so that people can attend dawn ceremonies. Well sorry mate, but I do have a problem with it. Most Australians on a salary have a certain number of public holidays factored into that package. ANZAC Day is one of the few holidays that you can lose just because of the vagaries of the calendar (poor New Zealanders some years lose both Waitangi Day AND ANZAC Day). Who wins: the employer. Its not like they give you another day’s annual leave to compensate – which would be fair I think. Nope – you just loose the day.

So I for one, though it no longer applies to me, am delighted that from 2010 Australia’s federal government has seen fit to legislate so that ANZAC day will be taken on next working day if it falls on a Sunday (in 2010) or Easter Monday (2011 – ANZAC Day’s holiday will be on the Tuesday)

Poor old New Zealanders will however continue to miss out on paid leave because of when ANZAC Days falls – so I for one will again fail to get anywhere near a dawn ceremony – way too early in the day for me!

Tourism Queensland  now admit that they underestimated the response to their highly paid offer of a Queesland island job on Hamilton Island. The job has moved like wild-fire all over the Internet and with over 1 million hits on the server bringing it down.

Since the web site islandreefjob.com went live on Monday there have been over 2000 applications - but its not too late to apply. The job for “island caretaker” is open until 22 February - after which 11 candidates will be short-listed and flown to Queensland for the final interviews.

No point brushing off your on-line resume though for this one. Applications for the island job must submit a 60sec online video explaining why they are the best person to give the $100k (A$150k ) job. Queensland tourism are looking for applicants who “know how to stand out of the crowd ” and provide the “creative application”. In fact  I think I see the twist - all approved videos are on the site are rated in terms of views and popularity ratings. So basically if you know how to dominate youtube you should do well with this application process for a Queensland island job.

Applications are open worldwide so it might way be your foot in the door if you are considering moving to Australia and no its not just for the young and free - the applicant can bring a few friends/family -afterall there is a 3-bedroom house included in the deal. The site also emphasies that applicants should demonstrate some knowledge about Hamilton Island in particular and Great Barrier Reef in general - so it might be time for a quick geography cram cause people.  Must admit though from what I can see on the site most applicants do appear pretty young - and pretty girls are dominating the ranks at the moment!