Mona Foma’s northern delight

IT was a delight to witness Mona Foma’s arrival in Launceston on Saturday, with Gotye (Wally De Backer) playing a tribute to Jean-Jacques Perrey, playing the ondioline (a precursor to the contemporary synthesiser), with the Ondioline Orchestra.

Playing “in the round at the Albert Hall” is a seating configuration obviously preferred by Gotye, as evidenced by previous performances with his band The Basics. Following Gotye and the Ondioline Orchestra was Tannery: Tasmanian Taiko and Leather Orchestra’s Skin Migration.

With leather instruments, created or inspired by the late Garry Greenwood, accompanied by the Tasmanian Taiko drummers, it was an opportunity not to be missed to hear the leather instruments in concert, opposed to being a museum display, which I imagine would have delighted the late creator.

Being heard

I READ with interest Julie Collins’s article on senators (Talking Point, December 28) and would have to agree they are doing a poor job for Tasmania — whether Liberal or Labor. I remember going to Canberra with a group of Tasmanian exporters, having prearranged appointments over two days, and only one senator, Bob Brown, kept that appointment. It was at this critical stage Andrew Wilkie was to get $20 million from the then government to assist exporters with international freight out of Tasmania. It was the then Tasmanian Liberal government that pressed for changes to the Tasmanian Exporters Freight Equalisation Scheme so exporters were on the same footing as companies processing Tasmanian product in Victoria and receiving assistance.

This may be the reason for more independents in the Senate than party hacks who do not return calls and don’t acknowledge correspondence. It is giving rise to independents and eventually you go where you get a hearing. safety of your own video screen. But do Tasmanians want this? Do we really think it’s going to be good for our kids? I was in southern China where ethnic minorities are being turned into curiosities for tourists from big coastal cities with infrastructure development on a scale that has to be seen to be believed. We should work to keep these ideas away from Tasmania. I read about how young Chinese do not want to go on package tours like their parents but want to find their own experiences. Let’s invite some of them and let them loose on a disruptive tourist industry with small, diverse and devolved operators. collusion that had marked the development of gaming policy up to that point. His disappointment appears not to extend to meaningful reform and commitment to returning the tens of millions of dollars lost to these insidious machines. At a time when we might have expected some genuine vision, all we get is something dangerously close to the status quo.