Biking in Bright

Just had a wonderful weekend away, my first cycling holiday . It may not, and really isn't, sound impressive to the ardent cyclist, but I managed about 25km in an afternoon. I'm proud of myself.

Free health service

I received an appeal yesterday for funds for a friend who needs chemotherapy. The total bill comes to about RM30,000 for six sessions of chemo.

When I visited the Publications and Al-Quran Texts Control Department of the Internal Security Ministry in Putrajaya, I counted approximately 30 staff employed to censor reading materials. I don't know how many more are employed in departments elsewhere across the country, or the numbers employed in broadcast, film and audio censorship.

How much are we prepared to pay to help sustain life in Malaysia? I wonder what the comparative costs of maintaining the death penalty, of maintaining censorship, of employing people to spy and monitor the behaviour of fellow Malaysians engaged in political action is, in comparison to the amount spent on our public health services.

We are rich enough to give away land in Johor for the construction of amusement parks, but not rich enough to adequately fund our health service. Perhaps we should restructure our priorities before restructuring anything else.

Living rough

Last night, on the way to my Bollywood dance class (!), there was a woman crying in the middle of the street. She was drunk, she was cold, and she was extraordinarily skinny.

When I sat next to her, she was murmuring that she had been brought up to be strong. She has been suffering ten years of domestic violence, her kids aren't with her, and she feels a failure. She's survived heroin addiction, but still can't seem to make life work for her. She wants to have girl friends that she can talk to and confide in, but I suspect she makes it hard work, having been hurt, she's inevitably suspicious.

She said she'd been turned away from women's shelters, they were all full. In the end the police came, her (abusive?) partner came, and she went off with him. She'd told me that she was worried that if she stayed with him, she wouldn't last two months. But she was more scared of the police than she was of him.

What can be done? I do think society has a responsibility, but how can it be fulfilled? Certainly not the way it was handled last night - the cops know her, know she's trouble and are just waiting for her to mess up once more.

There seems to be no support for these women, hardly any community support, no structures, nowhere for them to stay, nowhere they can go. It's a terrible indictment on this society - and I wonder how well we'd fare by comparison in Malaysia....

Wings of Desire

Dorian and I watched 'Wings of Desire', the original German movie behind 'City of Angels'. It was remarkable how Hollywood could take such a nuanced film of the joy and fragility of life, set against horror and tragedy, and turn it into a sentimental love story. A good sentimental love story, but with as much depth as your average puddle.

I was talking at the shop today with a sales assistant, about kids and the dangers facing them as they grow up. She seemed to think that one of the main problems is a lack of discipline, that kids just aren't disciplined either by teachers or parents the way they should be. The papers seem to back her up - the dangers of treating children like 'little adults'. Hm. I wonder. Personally, I've never gone for the disciplinarian approach, either as a lecturer or as a bossy elder sister. I've gone for the idea that children (and young adults) are 'little adults'. This doesn't mean they should be exposed to all the nastiness of the world, or that there aren't things that are beyond their understanding - though I did explain basic atomic theory to my youngest sister when she was about three. She seemed to grasp the basics.

What it means is that I've always (tried to anyway) treated children with the respect I'd treat an adult - explaining why things are not right and so on. Whether I'll manage this when I'm a parent remains to be seen - but I think that the problem is not that we're treating our children like adults. I think the problem - as exemplified in 'City of Angels' vs 'Wings of Desire' - is that adults are treated as though they are children, unable to cope with anything deeper than sentimentality and/ or violence. Hardly suprising, if this is all that we're expected to be capable of, that we fail to pass on any meaningful values to our kids.

Yes, this is another rant against the commercialisation of the media, and the dumbing down of the populace. But at least I managed to smuggle *some* personal details about what I'm doing in here .

The joys of exercise

No, I am serious. I went for a proper cycle this morning and I feel great. Which reminded me of a caller to the Talk Back with Attitude show on 3CR last week. They were saying that rather than pumping money into a public dental service, the Government in Victoria should make toothbrushes, toothpaste and similar dental care essentials free (fancy stuff you pay for!).

I don't think this is a bad idea - but I don't see why it should be restricted to dental care. Public gyms and other health care activities help to make society healthier - and are probably more cost effective than large anti-smoking campaigns.... oh, and free tampons too, please!

Malay unity

Once again the clarion call goes up - at least it wasn't from a politician this time.

The Malays, we are told, must stay united. It makes me wonder... why? Who gains from unity, what is the benefit? After all, the ruling ethos of democratic Malaysia is one of market supremacy. And the fundamental principle behind that is that competition rather than cooperation is the way to go. Hard to compete when there's unity. Thus we are privatising our essential services, to help foster competition, in other words creating DISunity.

La la.

Protecting our people

Last week a few Malaysian activists were arrested in Indonesia. They had been there as part of an international 'Save Our Rice' campaign, trying to encourage support for small rice farmers, rather than for genetically modified, pesticide-intensive large scale rice farming, as a solution to current and potential rice crises.

It wasn't only Malaysian activists that were arrested. But the reactions of the Malaysian and Filipino embassies showed a stark contrast. For the Filipinos, the main concern seemed to be the health, well-being and release of the activists. For the Malaysian embassy, there seemed to be no concern at all.

Even if a Malaysian is arrested for murder, it is the duty of the consulate, the embassy, to provide support and assistance. Because the person arrested (under both Malaysian and Indonesian law) is innocent until proven otherwise. This courtesy, this duty of care extends as much to activists as it does to those accused of actual crimes.

Perhaps if we're trying to build a people-centred democracy, this is an area where reform could be undertaken quickly and comparatively painlessly - in the support offered to Malaysians by their embassies when overseas.

Visit www.pan-ap.net for more info on the arrests, the campaign and outcomes.

Practical things to stop the Kelau dam

Presuming that my last post had some resonance with you, you may want to take action. Obviously, the first thing to do is write to your MP, your State ADUN and to the newspapers, television or radio shows to say 'you're gonna do WHAT?', and express your concern. Make sure you check out the COAC website first, or take a look at the SOS Selangor website, or both, so that you know what you're talking about!

It would be good if, when writing, you could also list things that you personally have done to help cut water consumption. Some ideas:
a. Collect rainwater for watering plants, cleaning cars, mopping floors and the like
b. Get a small plastic bottle (like a small mineral water bottle). Fill it with water, and stick it in your toilet cistern. It saves that amount of water with each flush - and you'll find there'll still be plenty in the cistern for your number two's! Do the same at your office, give decorated bottles to your friends, became a toilet cistern fanatic!
c. Turn off the taps - when cleaning your teeth, when soaping up in the shower, when lathering the shampoo. Whenever you can, save that water!
d. Report leaks - in my experience PUAS is a lot more efficient now that it was a few years back, help them cut water consumption too.
e. Fix leaks in your own home. Stopping a dripping tap by fixing the O-ring is a simple job (just Google it and I'm sure you can do it yourself), and then you get that warm glow of having done your own fixing and mending.
f. Tell others (particularly restaurants!) to turn off their taps too....

Doing this, and then being sanctimonious about it, helps spread the message! Be a saint, then tell the papers, MPs, ADUNs, radio stations etc etc....

Kelau

How much water does the Klang Valley need, and how much are we prepared to pay for it?

The last stats I had (2001), the amount of water consumed per person (including industrial use and leakage and all the rest) was 525 litres. In Melbourne, they use less than 400 litres per person. According to the authorities, as expressed in their EIAs for the Kelau dam, this amount is NOT expected to decrease - not absolutely but not per person either. It is, in fact, going to GO UP. This is despite attempts to repair leaks, and all the rest of it.

Let us pretend for a moment that this is true. That in order to lead a decent life in the Klang Valley, you, personally need, say, 500 litres of water.

The question then becomes, how much are you willing to pay for it? Do you think that for your car washings, and twenty showers a day, and leaving the taps on while you brush your teeth, that it is worth evicting others from their homes? From their traditional lands? Desecrating their graves and sacred sites? And do this FORCIBLY? Not offering them the right to negotiate their own terms, but telling them, take what you're offered and basically keep quiet?

Because it really really doesn't have to be this way. Even if, even if we say that we in the Klang Valley are desperate. We NEED to have the water. It has to be done. There is still the possibility of entering into an agreement with those who are kindly making way for our 'needs', with the indigenous people of the area. We don't go in, plans in hand.

The first step would be to humbly and with full knowledge of customs, constraints and potential problems (by both the affected people we are asking to move for our benefit and the negotiators) to ask the people 'what would you like, to give up this land'. That's the way it works in business, ain't it?

The second would, um, be to give it to them. Think about what it would take for you, you personally, to give up your land, your livelihood, your graves, and to some inevitable extent your culture (because it is tied to specific sites). You're giving up tens of thousands of years of site-specific information, rendering the equivalent of PhDs of years of study practically worthless.

And if you think that no price would be sufficient, why is it that you're prepared to countenance that for other people? Just because they're Orang Asli?

And why should they be prepared with what the EIA's supplementary documents acknowledge to be an uncertain, harsh and inadequate livelihood (oil palm smallholdings), when they have given up... most everything.

Visit www.coac.org to make a difference.

New hope for Doha?

It seems, according to some of the Melbourne newspapers, that there may yet be a round of free trade agreements that come out of Doha. These will, they say, help the world's poorest people. So, at least, the leaders say.

Now, in theory, free trade works well, at least the way it was taught in uni. But there is a real problem with the way it was taught at uni - what free trade does is it increases the total amount of 'utility'. It doesn't say anything about how that utility is distributed. For the best outcomes, you need to start with a largely level playing field. And economics doesn't take power into account at all.

This isn't an easy issue, and it's easy for it to get really emotional - discussions about child labour, for example, often miss the point. There are different types of child labour - Jomo's book on child labour in Malaysia makes that clear. The work of kids in flour factories, where they can do nothing else, is fundamentally different from the apprenticeship children serve in a motor repair workshop, particularly if it is family-owned. The former denies them the right to education, to play, and to meaningful work prospects. The latter doesn't. It is often combined with formal education, as well as serving as a career path of its own, enabling the adult to follow open an independent business etc.

What robs children of their childhood is not child employment. This is a symptom of child poverty, excruciating in some instances. And this is what needs to be tackled.

It is the same with free trade. The problem is not free trade. The problem is imbalance of power, and in particular, money (not wealth, some of the poorest countries are some of the wealthiest in terms of natural resources). The current free trade system is not helping. It needs to be seriously revived - in the interests of all. Because the economist's arguments about protectionism are sound, to some degree - driven a Proton lately?

But they should only have force in as far as they've shown themselves able to fulfill their promises, particularly the promises that they make to the poorest, the worst off. And right now, they're failing badly.