1864 Denmark. ABC, SBS and Coen Brothers.

A hair-raising selfie around 1942 in Rotterdam

The Australian Broadcasting Commission or better known as ABC together with SBS are under threat by our Government. We all know they are obsessed by selling and privatising everything that’s not bolted to the floor. We know that since electricity was considered a saleable commodity and privatised, costs have blown out. Paying the electricity bill for many people is now a nightmare and fear driven. Many switch off power unable to afford it. Yet, we all use the same electricity coming down from all those poles and wires. The advice lately is for consumers to ‘negotiate’ the best deal with the myriad of companies that are re-selling electricity. The mind boggles. It is possible to save hundreds of dollars by doing that. How ridiculous a proposal that is! Are we supposed to ring around to get a good deal? What next? Negotiate our water, garbage disposal. Have you ever tried contacting an AGL or other electricity provider? You get a call centre from Shri-Lanka!

I can’t think of a single utility that the Governments has sold that actually brought better and cheaper services. The holy grail of ‘let the markets decide all’ works marvellously for shareholders and big end of town, but not for the consumers. Aged care, hospitals, education, post services, un-employment services, child-care, you name it. All are now inferior in their service delivery. Australia has one of the most unequal education systems in the world. The copying of England’s private school method has proven to have had disastrous consequences. Our education system is called a ‘A national calamity’.

https://www.theeducatoronline.com/au/breaking-news/a-national-calamity-australia-2nd-most-unequal-education-system-in-the-world–report/257471

The people of Australia at present own ABC and SBS radio and TV and are the last of the Mohicans that give pleasure to millions, and it is free from commercialisation. True, SBS does have advertising but it also provides all those programs available on Smart TVs and ‘On Demand’. This is what we now look forward to. However, our present ‘Market and US’ copying driven Government is getting increasingly stroppy with the ABC, which is seen by the present Liberal Government as biased and critical. Both the Chairman and Managing Director have been sacked. The fear now is that the position will be filled with Pro- Government stooges. Funding is being cut and all is set to sell the ABC and get the Murdoch’s News Media with Bolt and Alan Jones.

But, as I started this piece. SBS ‘On Demand’ has give us many evenings of great TV watching. We have seen 4 episodes of the 8 series of a marvellous TV series named; 1864 Denmark War.

https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/program/1864-denmarks-war

What I like about most of the Scandinavian series is the naturalness of their actors. They  look like normal people. None of that made up perfect looking actors so often featured on English/American speaking TV drama series. The American Coen brothers have made another movie. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6412452/

I can’t wait to see it. They are one of our most favourite film makers. One of their previous movie, ‘No country for old men’ is superb. But, on TV the foreign mainly Scandic series are my favourite with English subtitles. It’s so much better than studying power bills.

 

Australia’s Timeless Art and Blue Mosque of Istanbul

And where are our monuments of tolerance of faith, acceptance of all? I suppose the few Mosques scattered around our cities would have to bear some witness to this. But the fanatical opposition to be seen to care about boat people’s arrivals, a miniscule problem amidst the murder of thousands in where they come from, somehow negates and demolishes our image of tolerance and acceptance.

The Christmas Islands, Manus and now the towing back of boats, demolishes any attempt of our bridging between the home brew of local Presbeterion Christianity and our understanding of mainly tolerant Islam.

Our temples still are the Workers Clubs with crossed hammer and plumbers wrench in Revesby, the RSL’s with their gaming machines and foaming Coopers brew, the cricket and footie stadiums still remain our pastiches of blue Mosques. Not Istanbul but in Parramatta and St Kilda. The Alhambra might well be seen in Canberra’s lake Griffin with a bike track for politicians in shorts and wearing pointy helmets. Who knows?

Our lasting temple wedded down as proof of eternity and timeless beauty is seen in the sails of our Opera House, but it was Danish design, somehow a smudge on our own creative genuineness.
No, the real temples of spiritual continuity giving us an anchor for Australia to cling to are these.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ancient+aboriginal+cave+painting&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=KMLLUuz1BcvhlAXUr4DYBA&ved=0CCkQsAQ&biw=1038&bih=503

They are as timeless as Chartres, St Peters, or Istanbul’s blue mosque. We still have to credit and acknowledge the real Australian indigenous more solidly. It is underway, a work in progress.

Females need not apply in Australia; Try Iran.

Afghanistan has more females in Government than Australia.
http://www.news.com.au/world-news/women-better-represented-in-afghan-cabinet-than-in-australia/story-fndir2ev-1226720398777
It is amazing but Australia is now a deep embarrassment to the world. There is just one female on the front bench.

Norway just appointed its second female prime minister. Germany has a female chancellor Angela Merkel. Finland has 86 women in parliament which represents 43% of its 200 members.
Bangladesh has a female PM as has Denmark. Iran’s Vice-President and Head of National Youth Organization Farahnaz Torkestani is a woman.

Ahmadinejad appoints 4th woman to cabinet
Afp, Tehran
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sacked the head of Iran’s National Youth Organisation yesterday and appointed a woman to the cabinet post, official media reported.
Ahmadinejad removed Mehrdad Bazrpash and named Farahnaz Torkestani as the head of the National Youth Organisation, the official IRNA news agency said.

So, in summing up!

Abbott is either incapable of seeing and recognizing capable women for his cabinet or ‘his women of merit’ women don’t want to have a bar of his present coterie of the sneering beady eyed males burrowing away in Canberra. Either way, it doesn’t speak well for the integrity of our present government led by Abbott.

And cop this too Abbott.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10313055/Why-some-Australian-women-loathe-Tony-Abbott-especially-now.html

Borgen :11 out of 10

Borgen; 11 out of 10.

You can’t go past a good series of Danish TV. Not long ago we had ‘The Bridge’ and ‘The Killing’, which I believe was a Swedish-Danish Co-production. It was riveting TV watching and we were counting the days when it would be on again. The pepper-crackers would be out and the Stilton cheese with the Shiraz brought to room temperature together with my ear-phones. Those earphones were superfluous. The series were translated in English sub-titles but I wanted to hear the Danish language. Dutch and Danish are brother languages, (or sisters for the pc readers of this blog).

What makes these series so extraordinary is the ordinariness of it all. The prime minister lives in a modest house with the dishes piling up at an overflowing kitchen bench top, husband walking around in his singlet and their children wanting to eat Coco-pops for breakfast. She goes to work on a pushbike without wearing a helmet, and seems to have no security concerns. Husband of the PM and mother of their two children seem to have the best of a most normal of functional marriage. The odd thing is, in most of the Northern European governments, the Borgen treatment of PMs (and their royal families), it is not that far removed from reality.

The TV show apparently was difficult to obtain in the US with claims by competing commercial TV stations of piracy. I believe in California people can now see the series legally. It seems that the differences of political systems and the holders of power between the US and Denmark were seen as almost un-transferable in a TV series and, that at least in the US ‘normality of politics’ is hardly ever residing in a world of being ‘normal’. No president would go to the White-House on a bicycle and would probably have to go through numerous security cycles to just buy his wife a bunch of flowers.

The Danish TV drama shows how the PM can remain herself despite having risen to the highest office. She remains cool and normal and the series is not blown up in grandiosity like so many American dramas such as West-Wing, Homeland, and House of Cards. There are no lines of limousines or black-clad security lurking on roof tops with machine guns at the ready or hovering gun-ships overhead. No one is seen talking into their sleeves or wear Polaroid sunglasses.

The Danish way on thorny issues and legislations are resolved or passed with the parties sitting around the table sipping coffee and making sensible compromises within minutes. The Danes have a serious addiction to caffeine. What I would not give for our Australian politicians to behave like that!

We had just about given up on TV watching when Borgen rose up like Phoenix from ashes, none too late. The urgings of funeral insurances advertisements and the manic laughter of so many comedy trailers got us so depressed our intake of Stilton with Shiraz almost doubled. True, the Ancestry.com.au kept us going but soon waned when most of people restlessly searching for their ancestors ended up teary and overwrought when it was found out, their great, great, great, great grandfather had succumbed to whoring and a dose of the clap with blindness to dear Aunty Betty at birth in 1789 in Yorkshire to have been a result of all that.

We soon came to switching off the telly and just sat amongst the crackers and cheese, talked or did the after dinner washing up instead.  Not anymore now though. Another five days and Borgen will be on again.

There is hope for all of us now.

Go, buy some good cheese and watch “Borgen.”