THE CRUELTY OF QUARANTINE
john.andersen@news.com.au
THE state Labor government has kept COVID out of Queensland, but it has been at a cost. Lives are at stake, but it is the inconsistent, galling lack of compassion shown to families who are being forced to quarantine for two weeks in hotels where they are charged up to $2000 a week, often in a room without windows or a balcony, that rubs salt into a festering wound.
Making it worse is that they are being charged $60 to $70 a day for food that you wouldn’t feed to your dog. We could accept this sort of brutal disregard for people’s wellbeing early into the COVID management phase because well, the plan was, we didn’t have a plan. Nearly eight months have passed and instead of having checks and balances in place to ensure people can quarantine at home, distraught individuals and families are being forced into eight by eight metre gulags simply because we still don’t have a plan.
Many of these families are dealing with bereavement or are visiting gravely ill loved ones. The government has had time to put a team into place to manage these situations and to ensure people who have to quarantine on compassionate grounds can do so at home. It hasn’t materialised in Queensland. If you are a celebrity or billionaire you can quarantine from home, but if you are a pleb it’s off to a pub room and microwaved TV dinners for you. Western Australia has one of the toughest border measures going, but it still allows people to quarantine at home. The Smart State is not look
ing so smart.
LEFT RIGHT OUT
AGRI-POLITICS is getting more and more complicated and I’m blaming the sugarcane sector, in a good way. Originally we had Canegrowers, the peak organisation for sugarcane growers. Then a couple of splinter groups hived off to do their own thing. And then early this year we had a group of Burdekin farmers form AgForce Cane under the Agforce banner. Agforce is the peak body for sheep and wool growers.
And now we have Farmers United, comprising cattle and cane farmers. This is all happening because farmers more and more feel like the bird on the lid of the Arnott’s biscuit tin – left right out. Russell Hall from Clare in the Burdekin is a director of Farmers United. He told me this new group was trying to get political parties to realise the $17 billion farming sector exists. More than anything he wants to bridge the city-rural divide.
WAITING FOR ANSWERS
YOU can understand blokes like Russell Hall and his fellow Farmers United members wanting to raise the awareness of agriculture. Have you noticed the paucity of agricultural policy in this campaign when it comes to the two major parties? It feels like agriculture is the dorky cousin no one wants to know. I asked Canegrowers chairman Paul Schembri about it. He is waiting for both Labor and the LNP to say something big and positive about our primary industries. He’s puzzled as to why it is not front and centre. Mr Schembri can remember a time in Queensland politics when all the key announcements were built around agriculture. He’s hoping next week one of the major parties will press the ‘A’ button.
GOOD OLD TIMES?
MEANWHILE, has anyone thought about the Farmers United acronym? It’s applicable, given the treatment the agricultural sector is getting from the major parties.
NOW that Twiggy Forrest has bought R.M. Williams from Louis Vuitton and it is back in Australian hands we can only hope he will start producing those magnificent catalogues so beloved by Aussies who grew up in the bush from the late 1930s through to the late 70s.
It was in these catalogues that Reg Williams advertised Silver Spur hats, denim jeans, shirts and Cubanheeled boots. Fellers out on the stations would argue about what was the best boot, the round-toed Bushman or the chisel-toed Santa Fe.
The argument for the Santa Fe with the fancy stitching on the toe was that it was easier to get into the off-side stirrup iron if the horse you were mounting started bucking or shying as you swung into the saddle. Despite this theory having some merit, the general consensus was that blokes who wore Santa Fe’s were lairs. Ringers out on the stations could buy everything from these catalogues. I knew a bloke, Billy Wellsmore. He was a ringer on Toolebuc Station near Middleton.
Billy was a bachelor in his early 50s at the time. He was an old school, gun ringer. The sort of bloke who could stay on the tracks of cattle for hours on end in unfenced country.
He would counterline saddles with hair he pulled from the tails of horses he was shoeing. At night, sitting around a fire or in the glow of a carbide light he could punch the most intricate designs into the lids of tobacco tins with his pocketknife.
He never owned a car, but everything he did own, from his swag and blankets to every single item of clothing he wore, plus his comb and hair oil, he ordered from the R.M. Williams catalogue.
The models in those old catalogues were blokes at work out on the stations and most were in the desert country of southwest Queensland and South Australia.
They were the real deal. R. M.
Williams has changed now. Horses have largely gone from the stations and ringers like Billy are lying six feet under in unkept graves in cemeteries in bush towns around Australia.
Now you are more likely to see politicians and bankers wearing Williams belts and boots than you are a station worker. It’s great though the R. M. brand is back in the hands of someone who grew up with it on stations in Western Australia and knows and understands where this famous name sits in the Australian psyche.
SCOOTER MADNESS
DON’T get Townsville’s Hugh Ripley going on e-scooters. You’re either for or agin’ them. He’s in the agin’ category, especially after hearing a thud a few nights ago. A distinctive thud. Upon investigation he found that someone had ridden an escooter into the side of his car ( pictured above). The rider had vamoosed, leaving the scooter parked up against the ding in Hugh’s car door. Last I heard Hugh had impounded the scooter and was waiting for someone to turn up and claim it. Perhaps they might come to an agreement regarding repairs.
POSITIVE PROMISES
SOME wild election pledges around, but there have been two good ones this week. One is Labor’s proposed inland highway from Charters Towers to Mungindi. Ripper idea if it ever comes off as it would take thousands of Sydney-melbourneAdelaide-perth bound trucks off the Bruce Highway.
This is the faster alternative to cities like Sydney and Melbourne. Truckies use this route now. A lot of them go to Torrens Creek and head south from there. It saves heaps of travel time. The LNP’S youth curfew on children under 17 will not be politically palatable to some, but it sounds like a sure-fire way of reducing crime. There has already been predictable opposition from human rights groups but voters will flock to support a curfew.
ONUS ON RESPONSIBILITY
CHILDREN out at night would be taken to refuges and their parents fined. The bit about fining the parents might get complicated as these fines will never be paid. Instead of wasting time on fines, try to drum some sort of responsibility into the parents. The big hurdle will be the location of these refuges. No one is going to want a houseful of firstyear-apprentice junior crims next door or even in their neighbourhood. And cops won’t have time to run these juveniles out to a remote refuge, say 40 minutes from the city centre. So, where will it be?