the perils of foster caring, part 3

However, nothing like that came close to happening, until the last week he spent in my care. That was a trip to Victor Harbour, of infamous memory.

This six-day trip, entirely paid for by myself I might add in injured tones, was initially intended for a group of adults as well as the boy and Sarah’s fourteen-year-old grandson Michael. The cottage was booked, I’d made the promise to the boy and to Michael, but our friends John and Deborah had to pull out due to work commitments, and then Sarah also pulled out due to a crisis involving her two-year-old granddaughter Courtney (now in her permanent care, with my assistance).

I heard the alarm bells. Six days alone with Michael (himself quite a handful) and this sometimes hyper-active, often impulsively transgressive kid, wasn’t my idea of a holiday. I tried to arrange for Sarah to come down for at least a couple of the days, but it was all too difficult.

Mostly it went well. I blew up at the boy once early on, when I caught him trying to set fire to Michael’s hair from behind, but even he seemed to accept that my anger was justified. By the last day or two, though, my nerves were getting pretty frayed.

The night before we returned, I took them for a meal at the Victor hotel. Afterwards we strolled along the bridge to Granite Island. The two of them had brought, or so I thought, bottles of soft drink with them. Halfway across the bridge the boy threw, or pretended to throw, his empty bottle into the drink, crowing something like ‘I’ll just get rid of this.’ I grabbed at him, and told him fiercely that that was unacceptable behaviour. ‘Ow’, he said, ‘Hey, I was only kidding, I didn’t have anything in my hand, you know I would never do a thing like that.’

Later, when he told police I’d punched him on the back of the head, he admitted that he had thrown the bottle. Perhaps this is irrelevant, except insofar as it illustrates his shaky relationship with the truth. In any case, I apologised immediately, and I thought that was the end of that. Later during that same walk, though, I had another go at him for slagging in public, which he often did. He’d argued with me – or at least he’d produced a defence of sorts. Slagging was cool. I probably went on too long with the lecture, and he looked very put upon. Later, a friend suggested I might’ve used a different reasoning, pushed the point home in a more light-hearted way: ‘Hey, you don’t think spitting’s disgusting, fine, so why not go further? How about shitting in public? Next time you feel the twinge, how about dropping your daks [is that word recognised by teens today?] and pooing on the pavement? I know it doesn’t sound too cool but you could start a new trend…’

The fact remained that I became a little overbearing, and it was during this walk along the Granite Island causeway that he started to harp on how keen he was to get back home to Mum for the weekend.

I blew up at him again when we were packing to leave. I was trying to get the pair to vacuum the lounge, where they’d made a great mess dragging in logs and twigs to start evening fires, but finally I gave up and did it myself. Then I asked the boy to empty the vacuum cleaner. He did so, dumping its contents on the stoop. I gave him such a blast for this that tears came into his eyes. This really was my mistake – he was just a wet clueless kid, who’d never emptied a vacuum cleaner before. It didn’t come ‘naturally’ to him to see that dumping something outside his own immediate area was just going to cause headaches for others. After all, whole national governments had trouble recognising this. So I tried to make light of it, and we drove home without incident, though the boy often spoke, with a growing excitement, of the prospect of seeing his Mum. And I did feel a trace of jealousy, in a general way about fatherhood, not at all about not being father to this particularly draining kid.

I knew I’d made mistakes. My own impulse control had proved problematic. I’d reacted without due thought. Still, I’d recovered quickly, apologised when necessary, and tried to get back on amicable terms as soon as possible. On the whole, I felt that no great damage had been done.

Not long after our return, the boy was picked up as usual by his mother for the weekend. In front of her, he’d put his arm around me and assured me it had been a great fun trip. I never saw him again.

The boy was late returning on the Sunday evening, so I rang his Mum. She told me he wouldn’t be coming back, and that I should check my answering machine. She was clearly very emotional. I asked what this was about, and she said something about my having attacked and hit the boy. I assured her - and I was quite calm, if bewildered - that I had done no such thing. She didn’t wish to discuss the matter and again referred me to the answering machine. There I found a message from a police officer, telling me that certain allegations had been made, though not of any serious nature. I rang the number, and the officer explained that the boy had made a couple of minor claims about me. First, that I’d clapped him round the ears on the bridge, and second that I might have done ‘something sexual’, though this seemed to be a simple misunderstanding. The officer was, I must say, very sympathetic to my situation, and confided that the boy’s story was ‘pretty incoherent and contradictory’. ‘Does he want to go and live with his Mum, does he?’ he asked shrewdly.

The ‘sexual’ claim referred to an incident I’d put out of my mind immediately after it occurred. The three of us were trying to negotiate a maze in an adventure playground on the outskirts of Victor Harbour. The boy, impatient and bamboozled by the labyrinth, opted to take a short cut out of it by climbing one of the tall, thin timber fences. I’d worked out the maze enough to know that mounting that particular fence would not move him forward one iota, beside the fact that it wasn’t in the spirit of the game and might damage the barrier. I called him down, but he wouldn’t listen, so instead of trying to grapple with him, I tugged playfully at his trousers. It worked, though he looked askance at me, and it just crossed my mind that I’d made another mistake, this time one of ‘over-familiarity’. However, I soon put it out of mind, perhaps for profound psychological reasons.

This was the possible sexual advance the boy was accusing me of. Feeling a little dizzy at the enormity of it, I hadn’t the presence of mind to point out that this had taken place in the middle of the day, during the school holidays, before a flock of passing parents and their kids. I mumbled something about it being totally innocent, and found to my relief that the officer seemed already to have come to that conclusion. He preferred to focus on the bridge incident. I told him that young Michael was my witness to the incident, and gave him Michael’s number. ‘I’m not sure if we’ll talk to him at this stage,’ the officer said. ‘We realise that you were punishing him for throwing a bottle into the water, and we don’t see that your action lies beyond the bounds of normal chastisement,’ he said. ‘Okay, that’s fine,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t hit him.’

Later, the policeman rang again to tell me that Michael had confirmed the boy’s story that I’d hit him. On reflection I realised that this wasn’t so surprising – the bridge was very dark, Michael had walked on ahead, and the boy had shouted ‘Ow’ when I rounded on him. Once again I denied the claim. ‘Okay,’ the officer said affably, ‘we’ll record that you deny the claim, and it won’t be taken any further, I mean it’s reasonable chastisement as far as I’m concerned, but we have to issue a warning, and that’ll be the end of it, the boy’s mother’s happy with that. I’m sorry about all this, I can see the lad would’ve been quite a handful.’

I wasn’t too happy to let it go at that, but I didn’t want to stand too much on my dignity in what must’ve seemed to the police such a trivial matter. And so the boy remained in the care of his mother, but the Anglicare team expressed their full confidence in me, assigning another lad to my care almost immediately. I myself felt badly shaken, but I’d learned a number of valuable lessons. I wasn’t about to let this setback spell the end of my foster-caring career.

So another six months rolled by. I looked after another lad briefly until another carer could be found for him (the boy was based in the south and didn’t want to be disentangled from his network there), and then in December my ‘current’ boy moved in, and was whisked away at the end of April when this new accusation was made. I’ve found out indirectly that my accuser is this same boy who’s given me such trouble before. It’s a more serious accusation than the last one, it seems, and this time I can’t even guess what it’s about. The placement was monitored on a weekly basis, and no complaints ever arose. Is this an elaboration of the previous accusations, or is it something entirely new? Did the boy’s mother make the accusation? Did she make it to CYFS or did she go directly to the police, as she did last time? Is it right that I should remain completely in the dark for getting on for five weeks now? Is there any redress for those who are subjected to false accusations? I’ve written to the police complaints authority, to try to get things resolved more quickly. There’s not much more I can do, but wait for the next instalment…

the perils of foster caring, part 2

The boy in question had been, at fourteen, the youngest of the boys in my care, and also the most demanding. The program I was part of usually handled kids closer to adulthood, the idea being to protect and encourage them in their transition to wholly independent living, but of course with the demand pressures and the crisis in supply of foster carers it was almost inevitable that the rules would be set aside in the name of urgency.

This boy was only the second to come into my care, and I was very much learning on the job. I’d completed a tricky twelve-month stint in charge of a gay lad with whom I’d found it difficult to connect. My approach was decidedly hands-off and undisciplined, and during our period of cohabitation he changed from a neat, polite, punctual, heavily routinised adolescent to a metal-adorned bottle blond with a wise-cracking habit, a clutch of pretty female fag-hag hangers-on (in fact they were all sweet kids), a small galaxy of older male hoverers, and an uncanny ability to wheedle more money out of me than I knew was good for him (or for me). His school life had gone largely by the bye, and he was in fact kicked out just after the placement ended, a few months before his eighteenth birthday. He still rings me from time to time, but only to borrow money.

The people at Anglicare assured me, after the cagily ultra-positive manner of social workers everywhere, that this placement had been a success, but I remained unconvinced. It was inevitable, I suppose, that I’d give the kid plenty of space, because I like to be given space myself. It’s a question though, whether taking so much space to myself has done me more harm than good. In any case, the Anglicare approach was to set up some clear guidelines to start with – house rules, or ‘norms’, division of labour, consequences attendant upon failing to keep up with what were fairly unintimidating standards. Once they’d fitted in with this, cut them some slack. This was what I’d been advised as a trainee teacher too, but I’d never been able to put it into practice.

In any case my match-up with my first foster-kid coincided with one of those regular occurrences in social worker workplaces, a staff upheaval in which a number of workers decided at more or less the same time, no doubt influenced by each others’ demoralisation, that they’d had enough, they were burnt out and needed something new, like domestic engineering or cycling round Australia or opening a clothes shop. My charge and I were left unsupervised, and by the time my current liaison person was appointed to us, the unhealthy pattern of our relationship was set. It was, basically, another illustration of this dictum by William Hazlitt (via Alan Bennett):

Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.

None of this really prepared me for the next lad. His age and level of development meant that I couldn’t adopt the same slightly distant approach. He was needy and dependent, always around. And noisy with it. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, he’d repeat stock phrases in funny voices – a sort of adolescent echolalia. He’d take things of mine - books with lascivious-sounding titles, or screwdrivers or clock-radios or mobile phones, and secrete them in his room. He’d steal into my bedroom when I wasn’t around, and download porn from the internet. He even did this on Sarah’s computer next door, when she was in the next room. He was regularly suspended from school for various pieces of cheekiness, nothing serious (hardly anything to warrant suspension in fact, but they do things differently these days).

Yet with all that, I coped quite well. We struck up an easy, bantering relationship. And there was the added boon of his going to bed at eight-thirty sharp every night. On weekends he stayed with his mother.

He was in my care for about five months all up, between May and October last year. We had regularly weekly meetings with Anglicare, and monthly review meetings involving the department (CYFS), and no serious issues were brought up. When asked how happy he was with the placement, the boy invariably gave it a score of ten out of ten (though I never set much store by this – he knew how to give the right answers).

Of course I knew I had to be careful. He was constantly pushing at, and past, the boundaries. Take smoking - he knew he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house, and made many solemn assurances that he would never do such a thing, never be so disrespectful (I suffer from chronic bronchitis, as he knew), but I continually found cigarette traces in the toilet or his bedroom (I rarely entered his bedroom, but when I did so after he’d been cleared out, I found dozens of butts in a bottom drawer by his bed). I often ignored this, but sometimes confronted him or reported him. The matter of his smoking in the bedroom, or his bed, was of course a serious OH&S issue, especially given that he’d been a regular fire-starter in earlier days. The smoking problem was compounded by the fact that his mother let him smoke at her house – one of the many differences between us that probably led to my undoing.

These constant transgressions, the petty pilfering, the noise and babble, the stream of bullshit (he often told a story of some burglar who broke into his mother’s house, and he’d attacked the burglar and chased him off – though in one version of the story he’d broken both the burglar’s legs), these sometimes got to me. I felt like strangling him (but I didn’t do it, honest). The difficulty is that when a kid persists in behaving badly, you’re forced to ‘intervene’, and this can be used against you if you’re not careful. For example, I was driving him to school, and he was being more than usually noisy. He’d taken my steering-wheel-lock and was machine-gunning schoolkids and their loving parents on both sides of the street. I might’ve felt some sympathy, but this wasn’t the first time he’d done this, and he’d been doing it for some time in spite of my too-light-hearted requests for him to stop. Finally I reached over, grabbed the thing off him and flung it on the back seat. He’d flinched and, for an instant, held on to it more tightly, so that there was a tiny moment of grappling. Now, what if this had lasted longer and if, in trying to wrestle the heavy bar of metal from him, I’d inadvertently struck him a blow on the scone?

the perils of foster caring, part one

Just today I heard on the radio that scads of revelations are about to come out regarding sexual abuse within the foster-care system. It’s the sort of stuff we foster-carers always dread, and often hear.

So I’m going to write a bit about my recent experience as a foster-carer, though I’ll avoid mentioning personal names of course. It might bring home to some the perils of foster-caring, and the vulnerable position they find themselves in.

Right now I’m playing a waiting game, the only game available. A little over three weeks ago, the seventeen-year-old boy in my care, the fourth boy I’ve acted as carer for, was whisked away for a ‘respite’ weekend, by CYFS, a department under the Minister for Families and Communities, which has responsibility or guardianship of kids who for one reason or another have been placed into the care of the state. This struck me as a little unusual but I didn’t think too much of it, and I was going out for drinks with some friends only half an hour later when I got a call on my mobile from a woman from Anglicare, the agency with which I’ve worked as a ‘Special Youth Carer’ as part of the SYC program for the past two years.

She told me that the young person had been taken out of my hands and wouldn’t be returning, and that a serious accusation had been made against me, but she couldn’t tell me anything more. She gave me the phone number of a person in the 'Special Investigations Unit', who was handling the case, but she assured me that, at this stage, he wouldn’t be able to tell me anything more than she could.

This was a Friday afternoon, and it was a hell of a way to spoil my weekend.
It was the second time I’d been ‘in trouble’, and my initial reaction was much the same each time. A state of mild shock, confusion. Loss of appetite, inertia. A snail buried deep in its shell.

About twenty minutes after this call I received another, from the Anglicare youth worker who’d been my liaison person for most of my time as a carer. She asked how I was, but I sensed a distance, a wariness. ‘I suppose you know what this is about,’ she said. I told her I hadn’t the slightest idea. I spoke tersely, wary myself. I didn’t particularly like it that everyone seemed to know more about what I was accused of than myself, and that they’d probably formed their own conclusions. She apologised, just as her boss had, for not being able to tell me more. I could barely respond.

More than a week went by, during which my liaison person contacted me a few times, to reassure me, to tell me to hang in there. I began to imagine that maybe she thought I was innocent after all. One day I received a call from the CYFS social worker who had charge of the boy who’d been whisked out of my care. He asked if he could come around to pick up some of the boy’s things. He, too, apologised that he wasn’t able to discuss any details of the case with me.

He arrived in the company of the boy, much to my surprise. I didn’t know what to say to him – especially as I didn’t know whether it was he or someone else who’d laid this complaint. Also, I noticed, or felt, that the CYFS worker was taking up a position between us, as if shielding the boy from any inappropriate questions I might ask.

So I went into the front garden and proceeded with the laying of my front path. The boy and the worker finally came out with his TV and a couple of bags.
‘So, what’re you taking?’ I said, trying to sound breezy.
‘Everything,’ the boy said with an easy grin.
‘Well, not everything,’ the worker assured. Unsuccessfully. The boy’s attitude convinced me that it was he who’d made a complaint against me. I felt as if I’d been stabbed.

Then later I wasn’t so sure. We’d always gotten on fine, he was very settled, he was doing well at school, CYFS and Anglicare were pleased with his progress, though he was a difficult kid, young for his age (like most of the kids in care, I’d noticed), very stolid and uncommunicative. Banter kept the relationship bobbling along.

Others I talked to also felt that it was unlikely to be the boy. And it was true that his apparent happiness at leaving my care could just as easily be interpreted as going cheerily with the flow, making the most of whatever was being imposed on him.

My Anglicare liaison person rang to tell me there’d been a meeting about the situation. ‘I’m not allowed to tell you anything directly about the case, and I have to say, I think the way you’ve been treated is really really unfair, but I am allowed to say this: don’t assume that the accusation has anything to do with this current placement.’

These words were a godsend. A few further remarks and some questions from me made me realise what she’d been hinting at in previous phone conversations, that this accusation had come from the same source as the previous one, even though the boy in question had been out of my care for several months.

grrrrr

Again the Force is against me. This time it was at Barista that I tried to post a comment, on the Galloway performance, but my comment was ‘denied for questionable content’. This was an instantaneous thing, so clearly I’d failed to pass some automatic filter. Perusing my comment, the only problem I could find with it, in my humble opinion, was my use of the word ‘arse’, an anodyne enough word. I changed it to ‘backside’ and tried again, but got the same message. Then, at the very bottom (i.e. arse or backside), I noticed this weird and possibly explanatory message, doubtless from the god I don’t believe in:

Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at plugins/Blacklist/lib/Blacklist/App.pm line 44.

I’m sure this means that I’ve been blacklisted by every reputable blogsite. Anyway, I’ll post my comment huffily here.

Those of us who lapped up gorgeous George's performance the other day haven't necessarily gone over to his side - but I trust that DJ has more evidence against him than the US Senate seems to.
Apart from anything else, the speech might provoke bloggers - like myself - to get off their backsides (or on their backsides) and find out more about the oil-for-food scandal that Galloway has tried to make the real issue (as well as the war and its victims).
I mean he's surely right in arguing that these investigations are massively hypocritical in the context of the US's deceitful warmongering and the profiteering that has gone with it.
Sadly and predictably, the American media, in many ways as compliant as the media in a dictatorship, have given little space to Galloway's delicious riposte.

gorgeous George

Just been doing a bit of research on gorgeous George Galloway, who I’d only vaguely heard of before. There’s actually a Wikipedia piece on him. He was born in Dundee, just like me (bet you never thought Luigi was a Scot), and has had a chequered career as a leftist Labourite, before being dumped by the party for making overly virulent statements against the Blairights. He was always a firebrand speaker, but often under suspicion for his financial affairs – no serious misbehaviour has been uncovered though.
Not sure that I entirely agree with all his views – try this one for size:

"I am on the anti-imperialist left." The Stalinist left? "I wouldn't define it that way because of the pejoratives loaded around it; that would be making a rod for your own back. If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe."

An odd way of looking at things, to say the least.

I must say that all the biggest catastrophes of my life (apart maybe from the one I'm going through now) have involved women. So much for my political credentials. Omnia vanitas est.

I note that some of Galloway’s speech, most notably the point scored against Donald Rumsfeld, was recycled from another speech given in late 2003 and very favourably reported on by Aljazeera – ‘a historic speech, which could change the face of British politics forever..’. Not bloody likely. But then again, baby steps…

oh joy, oh delight

Undoubtedly the highlight of tonight’s SBS news was the speech (unfortunately, didn’t quite catch the beginning of it) given by George Galloway before a US senate hearing, investigating the claim, trumped up as far as Galloway is concerned, that he profited from Iraqi oil deals.
Well I’ve now listened to the lot of it here, and the initial part of it, the speech part, was quite delicious. You just want it to go on and on, with rambunctious, evidence-based strike after strike. I’m sure if I was up there, I would’ve lost it and descended into invective, but Galloway remained on theme and maintained the rage and contempt with dignity.
Theatrical, perhaps, but heartfelt surely, and if it causes more scrutiny, by more, previously indifferent, bloggers and such, of the oil-for-food scandal, well worth the effort. And hey don’t we all just love someone sticking it up this administration.

my odyssey

Well yesterday I finished reading Ulysses. I’ve started it many times, and read extracts many times. This time I followed through, buying a new very handsome Bodley Head hardback last June, on the centennial Bloomsday in fact. So it’s taken me near a year.
Impressions? It’s been a long time since, as a vaguely ambitious twenty-year-old, I read Dubliners and thought, no doubt pretentiously, of Elizabeth as my version of Dublin, a place where as a teenager I’d tried desperately to fit in, perpetrating my share of petty crime, fringing youth gangs, wondering if they were sniggering at me, knowing sometimes that they were.
I’d get my revenge through writing, I hoped, but was I up to it? Apparently not. A portrait of the artist as a young man was inspiring too [I recall reading out the hell and brimstone speech from it to my housemate, an art student, at a table dramatically lit by tapers, our electricity having been cut off], if not so obviously usable to me. Being bespectacled and skinny in those days, I suffered Joycean delusions, strolling down the then deserted Norwood Parade of a Sunday, ashplant in hand, until some hairy lout backed me into a laneway and ruffled my feathers for offering a passing glance to his none-too-attractive girlfriend. I began to wonder if it was really Elizabeth that had been my problem.
Where was I? Ulysses, yes would’ve made a start on it in them days, and on days in afteryears, but I was having my doubts, and anyway life’s the thing, places faces and finding my own way, artist as someyoungthingelse, and I read philosophy because of a friend, to keep up the end of conversation, and halfarsed obsessionalism took over, but kept on trying to make stories of my adventures, adventures of my story…
So over the year I’ve read the whole thing, though mostly absently, after a keen commencement, a busy performance of noting and researching. Lost interest, lost faith. The only things that kept my dander up towards the end (plenty in Molly’s monologue of course) were the sexual moments and innuendos. I found myself watching for them like the leery patron who paid for Anaïs Nin’s erotica. I couldn’t keep track of the cast of minor Dubliners, couldn’t be bothered trying to figure out the Latin phrases, the Spanish, the Italian, the musical allusions, the streetscape, the dream from the reality. In the Molly monologue, all unpunctuated, I couldn’t even be bothered most of the time working out where one thought or memory ended and the next supervened. Still I read the book, 1078 pages in the Bodley Head edition, and when I announced the fact at last night’s reading group meeting, I was applauded roundly. Hollow man, head-piece full of straw.

shitty technical matters

Brought to my attention recently that my comments facility wasn’t working, probably hasn’t been switched on for my months, good excuse anyway for why I’ve received no comments in that time. All fixed now.
On similar, been trying to post a budget comment to troppo armadillo, but keep getting this message:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /mt-comments.cgi on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.ubersportingpundit.com Port 80

Of course, I blame myself. To make matters worse I tried to rescue the comment, which was quite lengthy, to put here, but somehow managed to wipe it completely.

Beazley’s budget broadside

Seems I’m always way too late in weighing in, but Beazley’s stirring budget response has received quite a few plaudits from our good blogger friends. Still educating myself on economic matters, but Beazley claims that the nation’s current wave of wealth owes more to a minerals boom than to any Conservative Party policies, and that the government is squandering the opportunities this bounty opens up. Their tax cuts indeed are damaging the nation, being targeted more towards those with less need of them, thus further opening the rich-poor divide and promoting the politics of envy [well, he didn’t say that, that’s my spin].

The speech, after initially focussing on the tax cuts and tax thresholds and how Labor would’ve set them and balanced them, looks at various areas of reform that have been neglected by the incumbents, such as addressing the skills shortage and targeting infrastructure development. To me he sounds convincing on this, especially when pointing out that it has been Labor governments who have put ideology aside and addressed real and much-needed reforms in the eighties and nineties, such as market deregulation, compulsory superannuation, the movement away from protectionism and so forth. The Tories have long had a policy of non-interference if not downright neglect. A matter of ideology breezily aligned to sheer slackness. And surely it’s true that this is a populist budget [Beazley insinuates that it’s a ‘get Costello elected PM’ budget] which evades all the hard decisions, hurts the impotent few on welfare benefits, neglects crucial areas such as education and training [particularly apprenticeships], child-care and labour market reform [to make real part-time work available for those being pushed onto the dole].

Our foreign debt is astronomical, complains Beazley. Presumably this is about a poor import-export ratio, though it’s not clear what Labour plans to do to redress this, if anything. Still, it’s an eloquent response, even inspirational in places, as it adumbrates a few positive policies, as well as firmly imprinting on our minds the difference between the two sides of government, against those who like to claim there isn’t any.

Tim Dunlop does as good a brief summary of the budget as anyone:

Ten years of populist conservative government and this is what it boils down to: tax cuts for the highest paid, no real investment in the future, and a Treasurer more concerned about shoring up his leadership ambitions than delivering necessary reforms.

the DPP’s upset, and that’s just the beginning

The new Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Pallaras, only two weeks into his job, has inevitably warned politicians off his turf, describing the kind of pressure he’s experienced in this brief time as extraordinary and unprecedented. Now, many of us are wary of Rann’s law and order push, especially as being in jail’s no picnic and has little or no rehabilitating effect, but the McGee hit-run case has really created a lot of anger and cynicism here (to judge by remarks overheard at a wizards dinner last Friday).

Eugene McGee, 50, an Adelaide lawyer, struck and killed cyclist Ian Humphrey while driving a four-wheel drive vehicle along the Gawler to Kapunda Road in the Barossa Valley in November 2003. McGee pleaded guilty to driving without due care, a rather minor charge under the circumstances, and received a light penalty (a $3100 fine and 12 months’ suspension of his licence). The cynicism comes in because McGee is a high-profile lawyer and former police prosecutor who has apparently participated in the processing of many cases similar to the case against himself, and the cynics claim that he used this knowledge to get himself off with a much lighter punishment than anyone else would have reasonably expected to receive.

Legal experts have criticised Rann, for example in this article:

But criminal defence lawyer, Simon Slade, says it is not the Premier's place to intervene in the judicial process.

"It seems that this is just a reaction to one high-profile case," he said.

"The danger of course with that is that we end up with a government that changes every law just because there's a jury verdict that it doesn't like."

Mr Slade says the inquiry has been announced because an appeal probably would not have been successful.

"Given my experience in this area the sentence couldn't be described as manifestly inadequate compared to other sentences for other cases," he said.

"People need to be very careful not to compare this to cases where people have been found guilty of death by dangerous driving."

However, I think Slade has been carried away by technicalities. The issue here is whether McGee should have been found guilty of that charge, whether all the evidence was presented, whether McGee himself obscured evidence (of his level of intoxication), aided and abetted by the police and lawyers.

McGee told the trial that he’d been drinking wine at a lunch hours before the accident, but didn’t consider himself intoxicated. When he turned himself in, some six and a half hours after the accident, he wasn’t breath-tested or blood-tested for alcohol. The cynics argue that he didn’t turn himself in precisely because he wanted to avoid being breath-tested. They also argue that, as an ex-policeman, he was the beneficiary of cronyism. Witnesses, who for some reason I’ve yet to discover didn’t testify at the trial by jury, claim to have seen McGee driving erratically just before the accident.

The lightness of the penalty, coupled with the social prominence of the accused, has caused consternation amongst the public (I note that cyclist groups are particularly incensed), and a royal commission has been called, to investigate the police handling of the case. McGee was acquitted of dangerous driving but found guilty of the lesser crime of driving without due care. He pleaded guilty to two other charges, failing to stop at the scene of an accident, and failing to render assistance. The maximum penalty, presumably for all these charges together, was one year’s gaol. The Rann government has now introduced legislation to parliament that would increase the maximum penalty to 10 years jail for causing death by dangerous driving. Presumably this is the dangerous driving charge of which McGee was acquitted in any case, so that wouldn’t have made too much difference. Personally I don’t like this increase in gaol penalties approach, the prison system is iniquitous and pernicious and should be avoided if at all possible, to me the obvious answer to dangerous driving and the like is stiffer penalties with regard to licences. It seems to me, on the basis of what I know so far, that McGee should have lost his licence for a far longer period, perhaps for life.

I also think that in the matter of fines, the impact of the crime should be considered, the effect upon the family of the victim, even the effect upon society as a whole – for example, the effect upon cyclists generally and the level of safety they feel. A kind of compensatory effect for overall damage done. I don’t know who receives these fines – do they simply go into the state’s coffers? Surely the money, paltry though it is, should go to the victim’s family. It would be great to live in a society where this sort of thing was de rigueur, driven by the public. It certainly follows the line of any worthwhile ethics in my view, that a person who can well afford to pay should do so for the benefit of his victim’s family. As it stands, lawyers will undoubtedly see far more of McGee’s money than the family of Ian Humphrey will, and surely that is morally wrong.

After being made aware that McGee could not be retried, the Rann government has called this royal commission, perhaps to be seen to be doing something, though also no doubt out of a real sense of outrage. However, the commission cannot result in a retrial. McGee has largely gotten away with it. Or has he? I think of the more celebrated OJ trial. He was found not guilty, though few people were taken in, and he has largely been a pariah since the trial. The general public generally gets it right in these matters, unless this is wishful thinking on my part. McGee of course is no O J Simpson – I imagine him, perhaps wrongly, as one of those swaggering, slightly arrogant police detective types. Overly careless, overly clever. I hope he’s genuinely humbled by this experience. Maybe he might consider giving up his licence voluntarily.

honest J?

The following half-hearted effort’s already out of date – I started writing it before crashing and burning.

Always worth remembering that the term ‘honest John’ was first applied to our PM ironically by the union movement. I’ve always felt Howard was the most cleverly sneaky in his dishonesty of any politician I’ve observed. As Mungo McCallum wrote, he’s a consummate politician who lives and breathes political double-speak and knows no other world, has no other real interests. So, not surprising that he wants to hold onto the top job for some time yet.
The recent remarks he made in Greece are interesting for a number of reasons. They seem to me to reveal most baldly the methods he’s been applying for years, because both the arrogance and the gaucherie of this delivery goes beyond, I think, what we’ve usually come to expect from him. I note, though, that he’s already taking up the usual damage-control performance of man of integrity and innocence besmirched by the media, wilfully misunderstood but not prepared to put the blame on anyone else, for he understands how these things can happen and he has the utmost respect for the media etc etc. One of his formulaic protests – formulaic but unanswerable – is ‘that wasn’t my intention’. Note also that he’s using the media arguments against him to back himself up – ‘it defies belief that I would use an interview with two journalists in Athens to make a major statement about the future of the liberal party…[the party I owe so much loyalty to, etc etc]…’ Sometimes, it’s almost convincing. Of course there are two schools of thought about the honest J idea. Some consider that he gets elected because he really does come across as embattled but honest to many people. Others believe he gets elected in spite of people’s doubts about his honesty, because everything’s chugging along quite nicely thanks very much. For me in the end though it doesn’t matter what others think of him, I have to come up with my own view.
With the help of others.
A few bloggers are now saying Costello’s skewered, and that apparently this was the point of the exercise. To indicate to Costello that there’s no Kiribili agreement, no promise of a smooth transition, indeed no endorsed successor. Some of the same bloggers are also saying that the most conservative prime minister in our history has no desire to see his work undone by a damp liberal like Costello. How do these bloggers know this, and how can they squeeze such meaning out of a few words spoken in Athens? I’m all admiration.

crisis chatter

The last few days have put such stress on me that I find blogging and journal-writing (I generally keep a daily journal, which I’ve been doing for near twenty-five years, first on paper, and then on a personal computer since the mid-nineties, and I only post some of my journal entries to my blog) even more of a questionable activity than usual.

The stress I’m feeling is due to my having been accused of something as a foster-carer. I don’t know what, or by whom, but apparently I’m under investigation. The effect has been to undermine my motivation to do anything.

Lack of motivation, and faithlessness, have been important themes throughout my stop-start writing life. I think a lot of people get much of their motivation and energy from the effect of their actions upon others. Actually being able to witness an impact and an influence. Also, success is a great motivator. When I had a novel published in 1997, it was very energising. The novel wasn’t actually published until 13 months after I’d signed a contract with the publisher, so by the time of publication I had almost finished a second book, which the same publisher was expressing some interest in. I was starting to think hopefully about a career as a writer, and ideas were buzzing about in my brain.

The first novel was a commercial failure, as well as receiving a couple of surprisingly hostile crits. Not easy for a self-absorbed thin-skinned egotist like me to take. The publisher held on to the MS of the second novel for ages without giving me a firm answer, and naturally my hopes began to fade. I was also very uncertain myself about the quality of my writing and whether I was a ‘fiction’ writer at all, bearing in mind that I’d done far more in the way of journal writing than fiction.

However, I knew that there was no real market for my journal writing. Much of it was trivial and self-indulgent, though just occasionally I would confound my low opinion of myself by hitting my straps and expressing what I thought was a genuine insight in what I thought was genuinely original language.

What to do, though, with these moments of quality?

Well, now I’ve discovered blogging, though still I’m unsure what to do with it. To write about my own life and opinions was easiest, but I also have to admit that from an external perspective my life isn’t much chop, and my opinions, on political issues for example, are hardly as informed as would be those with high and vast connections, and the historical perspectives gained from being constantly in the field. I’m a mere dilettante, who would be heavily reliant on other bloggers and journos for info. There would be little opportunity to make an original contribution.

Thinking about things like this made me hesitant and lost. I was better when I simply wrote, without thinking too much. Sure, nobody was reading my work, and I would love to get a discussion going, but most who view my blogs are too busy with their own, and those blogs that get a lot of commentary tend to be well-established and probably better informed than I am. Still, this shouldn’t stop me from pressing on, writing, commenting elsewhere, and trying gradually to learn about the technical side to make myself more accessible. So that’s what I’m doing, and oscillating between enthusiasm and despair, until something like this happens, this accusation, which makes me look up and realise that I’m in a precarious and vulnerable position financially and in other ways, that I’m middle-aged, loveless, childless, overly reclusive, and faced with a very uncertain future. Is it really wise to just keep on like this? I have no answer.

issues in science 4

Recent satellite observations have been used to detect ground level emissions of methane, the greenhouse gas, and there has been a surprise in the level of methane being produced by tropical rainforests – possibly through termites. This is the first time ground-level concentrations, near the source of the emissions, have been able to be measured in this way, so that speculation on causes can be more solidly based.

Interesting developments are occurring in the fields of computing, robotics and parallel processing with the application of electroactive and other gels. It seems chemistry is becoming as vital if not more vital than physics to the future of AI. Much of this is still at the stage of ‘huge potential’, but BZ-based chemistry is at the heart of the new activity. The BZ reaction involved cascading effects which can be organised to form circuits. As one expert points out, BZ chemistry is one of the best models for what goes on inside our heads. It’s moving closer to a biological model. The Blob apparently wasn’t sci-fi at all.

Some contradictory research is being published currently about the risks attached to cannabis use, along with contradictory interpretations of findings. The major point of controversy is whether cannabis use might lead to schizophrenia in young people. The results still seem inconclusive, and there are arguments about whether laws should be changed or warnings issued. The author of a recent survey that has given pause to the UK govt suggests laws to keep the drug out of the hands of teens, and to outlaw extra strong varieties. Others say the minority at risk is very tiny and new laws aren’t required.

From New Scientist March 26

not too happy

Been knocked sideways somewhat by a bit of a crisis re my foster-caring. Going to bed early, seeking the womb. Am starting to poke my head out again, looking at other blogs and the world. At least I'm losing weight, having no appetite. I think I need to abandon foster-caring, for health's sake. A terrible shame as it's a hugely undermanned area (man's the word), with carers trickling away over time. An article in the Messenger from July last year described 'a system wrecked by neglect', in which the number of carers of wards of the state has dropped from 900 in 1997 to between 300 and 400 at the time of the article. Under-resourced, under-protected, the usual story.
Anyway, this is the second time I've been put under a cloud in seven months, and I've had enough. Now I've got to think of making an honest living.