Opinion & Commentary
Blighty-style re-education
ARRIVING at Heathrow after nine years living in Australia, we dug out our British passports and joined our fellow German, Italian, Spanish and Irish Euro-citizens in the European Union queue at passport control. Within minutes we were through, and we moved on to the baggage hall to retrieve our luggage.
Glancing back, I saw hundreds of Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians, Americans and Indians still queuing patiently in the aliens line. I reminded myself of Basil Fawlty's advice: Don't mention the war.
OUR flight out of Sydney was delayed for five hours. As the departure time kept changing on the screen, I approached the Qantas customer service desk to find out what was going on.
The man in the queue in front of me asked if the delay was due to strike action.
``There is no strike,'' the official corrected him. ``It's a work-to-rule by maintenance staff.''
``So we are being delayed five hours because of industrial action?' I asked, as I took my turn at the counter. The official snapped back: ``Workers are defending their jobs.''
I pointed out that, as a customer relations officer, her first concern should be with her inconvenienced customers, who did not need political re-education classes. ``It's the company's fault,'' she persisted. ``If they weren't sending all the jobs overseas, the workers wouldn't need to take industrial action.''
I took my refreshment voucher and made a mental note not to fly Qantas again. With customer relations like that, the company and its workforce will soon find they have no customers left to inconvenience.
Perhaps I should be grateful for small mercies. At least we arrived in London with the fuselage still in one piece.
ONE of my first tasks on arriving in England was to buy a car. In Sydney I was driving a six-cylinder Commodore, but in Britain a car such as that will soon land you in debtor's prison.
Aussies may think they are paying through the nose for fuel, but punitive duties have pushed petrol to $2.50 a litre over here. I'd like to see Kevin Rudd's FuelWatch scheme make a dent in that.
Adding to this misery, from next year annual car registration fees will be graduated according to the amount of carbon each vehicle emits. This is so the Government can try to meet its Kyoto target.
Nearly half of British drivers face increased charges as a result of this new policy. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is leading the most unpopular Labour government in history (Labour recently suffered a catastrophic by-election defeat in its heartland of Glasgow East). Yet he seems determined to do everything he can to increase people's living costs.
Reluctantly, I turned my back on the gas-guzzling carbon-emitters lined up on the forecourt and bought a sensible 1.4 litre Ford returning 15km a litre, with carbon emissions in the second-bottom band.
There is one compensation, though. In a car this under-powered, I'm less likely to trigger one of Britain's 6000 fixed speed cameras. Two million motorists fell foul of one last year.
ONE benefit of moving to England is you get to see Jeremy Clarkson's Top Gear months before SBS shows it in Australia. In the first program of the new series, Clarkson pricks the eco-pretensions of the Toyota Prius, the hybrid petrol-electric car that celebrities buy to show they care for the future of the planet.
According to the program, building the Prius causes more environmental damage than most other cars. The nickel for the battery, for example, is mined in Canada, shipped to Europe for processing, and then transported to Japan for assembly, leaving a huge carbon footprint along the way.
Clarkson then sends his tame racing driver on to the test track with instructions to hammer the Prius as fast as he can while Clarkson keeps pace in a V8 BMW. Sure enough, at high speeds (or what passes for high speeds in a hybrid), the eight-cylinder Beamer recorded better fuel consumption than the Prius.
Clarkson's message? It's not the car you drive that matters, it's the way you drive it. Maybe I could have bought that second-hand Merc after all.
IF one group in Britain is persecuted more than drivers, it is smokers. As in Australia, smokers rank second only to pedophiles as pariahs and outcasts.
This week in Wales, a self-employed decorator was fined pound stg. 30 ($65) for smoking in his van. He was on his way to the shop to buy tea bags, but his van is classified as a place of work, and it is illegal to light up in any workplace: even if it's your own vehicle, no one else uses it, and you're off duty.
Also in Wales, a painting of a nude woman has just gone back on display 60 years after it was banned for being too brazen. But no sooner had it been retrieved from the vaults than it again provoked public outrage. The problem this time was not the bare boobs and confronting pose. It was the cigarette she is cradling in the fingertips of her right hand.
MEANWHILE, the Scots have just come up with an excruciatingly patronising proposal to pay smokers pound stg. 50 to quit.
Who with any modicum of self-respect would apply for a payment such as this? It implies you are too feeble-minded to take care of yourself unless paid to do so. It also betrays a contemptuous disregard for proper use of taxpayers' money.
Anyway, like so many government ideas, this scheme won't work. It is impossible to monitor compliance. Australians will remember when Warnie was paid by a nicotine gum company to quit smoking, but was then photographed having a surreptitious puff. How much more difficult will it be for the Scottish authorities to keep tabs on thousands of people who have promised to quit just to get the 50 quid?
MAYBE the Scots should copy the Dutch. In The Netherlands, they've just banned smoking in bars, restaurants and cafes, but this new law does not extend to cannabis. It is still legal to light a joint in one of Amsterdam's licensed coffee shops, but now it must contain no tobacco. Patrons are therefore getting high as kites smoking undiluted ganja.
``In other countries they look for the marijuana in the cigarette,'' explained one cafe owner. ``Here they look for the cigarette in the marijuana.''
Professor Peter Saunders was formerly social research director at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.
