Too busy taking careof business

YOU know how much we hate to be left off the map. Well, perhaps not this week when the Australian Federal Police revealed that members of the notorious Calabrian mafia were involved in criminal operations in Australia.

The mob’s presence was noted in every state except Tasmania.

I can’t help observing that the lack of organised crime in our State of Disorganisation should be no surprise. If Tassie can’t effectively organise hospitals, housing, traffic, public transport, reading and writing, profitable forestry, Macquarie Point redevelopment and almost everything else, how could we ever expect crime to be organised?

Still, it was a big story on the mainland, although no national news outlet bothered to speculate on Tasmania being the exception. Intrepidly I determined to investigate by getting invited to a midweek lunch of prominent River City Italians at the Australian Italian Club in North Hobart.

The club is a popular and friendly place to lunch. You don’t need an invitation, nor do you need to sit facing the door. Indeed, a couple of my companions told me that for many Italians it is better not to mention the mafia because any presumed cultural association with that colourful criminal organisation is considered insulting. I guess that’s understandable if you were an Australian Italian growing up with the Godfather movies and later the Goodfellas.

Personally, I loved the Godfather films not for the violence but for the food. Each movie was like an episode of MasterChef, except the losers don’t “go home”, they get rubbed out.

At the Italian Club the garlic pizza, the chicken bone broth with tortellini, the chicken cacciatore, and finally the orange panna cotta was an offer too good to refuse.

And no wonder it was so delicious. My table companions were in fact among the most illustrious of our Italian restaurateurs. Some were second generation in the family business. Others were qualified tradies who decades ago decided to commercialise their traditional Italian family love of food. Their simple business model was to do what came naturally and to introduce their own immigrant families’ classical Italian home cooking to a disadvantaged meat and three veg AngloCeltic population.

Tasmanians were hungry for it and the result has been some of our city’s greatest commercial success stories. To keep up with the demand, in July 1983 Ristorante Mondo Piccolo in Macquarie St imported Australia’s first commercial pasta machine.

Our Italians were simply too busy taking care of business to get involved in anything dodgy.

And although some of the Italian proprietors still jokingly call themselves the “restaurant mafia”, their darkest secrets are their recipes.

Accordingly, I won’t name the blokes sitting around the table (you’ll recognise them anyway), but one of them is so secretive about his pizza dough that he still mixes it himself, early every morning, in his Battery Point restaurant.

No one has ever stolen the recipe, even though those pizza bases are to die for. Or perhaps because of that?

Fresh pasta, olive oil, sundried tomatoes, prosciutto, parmesan cheese? Before the Italians, most of us knew niente.

Growing up in Tasmania in the dreary food culture of the 1960s I didn’t even get to eat pizza (which we called pizza pie) until I escaped Launceston for university in Hobart. About that time, thanks to the Italians, Tasmania’s food culture was changing beyond recognition.

After Umberto Tucceri’s Don Camillo in 1965 came Concetta’s, Romano’s, Mona Lisa, Maldini’s and too many more to mention.

And still they come. Italian is Hobart’s most popular cuisine and always my favourite.

When it comes to tucker, I can assure you that my dining companions this week have only one thing in common with the mafia: they run the joint.

And long may they continue to do so.

THE MAFIOSI

Australians should worry about are the

energy companies. Data from the ATO reveals that for the past seven years five of the giant gas companies operating in Australia have paid no tax on their Australian operations.

Between them they have made a combined income of $138bn from exporting our gas. They are now making even greater windfall profits as the world price escalates.

And although it’s our gas, they are making Australians pay more for it, which is a major factor in the present

And although some of the Italian proprietors still jokingly call themselves the ‘restaurant mafia’, their darkest secrets are their recipes.

spike in electricity prices and the threatened closure of some businesses.

If you want to buy shares in this highly profitable gas rip-off, the outfits concerned are Arrow Energy, AustralianPacific LNG, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Senex.

If you can’t beat ’em ... Of course, you are entitled to get angry if we are giving our gas away for virtually nothing. But there is no point getting mad at foreign companies who have no loyalty or obligations to this country. They have paid most of the upfront development costs, with hardly any local equity involved. Australians have a mere 4.5 per cent ownership of the companies extracting and processing our natural gas. Those companies’ loyalties are to their home nations and to their shareholders.

Hopefully the Albanese government will pursue an embarrassing inquiry into how the previous Australian government for the past decade has been asleep to this horrific inequity.

Let’s hope it was just the usual mismanagement and neglectful indifference — like selling a northern Australian military port to a belligerent Chinese Communist Party.

But surely the revelation of this gas fiasco is yet another argument for the federal ICAC promised by the incoming government.

A thorough inquiry might even look closely at the personal relationships between some of our politicians and the oil and gas companies that have grown vastly richer on the back of these absurdly lax arrangements.

LNG is said to be completely odourless.

So, how come we smell a rat?