$1.35 Billion well spent

I saw the train pull in and thought if I run I might just be able to make it. Alas, I’m not quite as nimble as I remembered and the train pulled away before I could make it. Swearing to myself I sat and waited. Twenty minutes between trains is the norm isn’t it? I was wondering though, why no one else tried to make the last minute dash for the doors. Two minutes later, a train pulls into the underground station and we are away. I’d paid a dollar for the trip, (a dollar!) and now I was entitled to go anywhere in the city. The stations were clean and the trains weren’t overly crowded. The tracks were all underground, transfers were quick and easy and I saw some people using ‘myki’ type cards. Even the teenagers seemed nice.

Clearly, I was not in Melbourne.

Melbourne, where I believe it costs $1.35 billion for a myki ticket, which you can get now, as long as you don’t want to use buses or trams, What a fantastic idea, I know it’s two years late but try and tell me it’s not worth it. It does appear though that Ms Kosky was a little concerned about the bad publicity the system has been receiving lately. She said, ‘it’s been a tough period but we really feel like we’re making progress. At least with the hot weather people are forgetting about the ticketing system and concentrating on the fact they can’t actually get anywhere, so that has been a relief. If we could get just get some decent bushfires now, our most recent figures indicate that 94% of people wouldn’t give a crap about how many billions the ticketing system cost.’

It’s funny how easily we become accustom to very poor standards. If only we could live up to the dizzying heights outlined above which was set by the public transport system in Santiago, Chile.

Where were you last Friday night?

The death of Nitin Garg last weekend was a deplorable act and we can only hope that the police find those responsible as soon as possible. It is a simple statement that could apply to anyone’s murder. Unfortunately in large cities such as ours these crimes do occur.

It is however, a little embarrassing watching the Indian media and government suddenly become so sanctimonious. The Indian government issued travel warnings to Melbourne and the media is demanding answers for this ‘racist’ attack. Maybe, the media are right, maybe this is the worst kind of racist attack that killed Nitin but isn’t it better to wait until motives have been established? Nitin’s wallet was found in the park so robbery was ruled out and apparently that only leaves ‘racist attack’ as the motive. They could well be right, no one including the police are willing to discount it, but it could just as easily have been an underpanted member of the Carlton Football Club, drunk, angry and disorientated after a week wondering the streets, unable to locate Crown. We don’t know, and can even come across as a little stupid when we try to guess.

Perhaps the Indian government could consider a similar warning for all of us in Melbourne (not just the Indian community) after the actions of Puneet Puneet in 2008. ‘It is advised to be aware of Indian drivers affected by drugs and alcohol on the roads in Melbourne.’ It only happened once a couple of years ago but at this stage the death toll is the same.

The Costs of Failing Our Children

Victoria’s Child Protection service is in crisis and the public has never been more outraged. We’ve seen stories about children placed in the care of convicted paedophiles, about workers who struggle to handle their case loads – often leading to burn out and impacting on the horrible retention rates. There’s even been a two-year-old girl who has died. She was killed by a man the department had determined should be responsible for her welfare. The signs of abuse were clear before the final assault - children shouldn’t have black eyes and head injuries.

So who’s to blame? Is there any point in finding someone to blame? Surely we should be more concerned about ensuring it doesn’t happen again. How do we stop it happening again? How do we improve the system?

The answer is heart-breaking simple and at the same time incredibly unlikely to be achieved. The system needs more money. Child Protection workers earn about $54,000 a year, $17,000 a year less than NSW. How can we attract the best workers with those wages. We’ve been informed that there are approximately 90 vacancies across the state and the government has committed to providing another 100. Now there are 190 vacancies and untold numbers of kids who don’t have a case-worker but are being ‘monitored’. A euphemism if ever there was one. We know Child Protection Workers don’t have enough time to work properly with their cases so we can, unfortunately, imagine what is happening right now to those children being ‘monitored’.

This is only one issue, there are many more.

Residential units generally don’t get a lot of publicity and often people don’t even know they exist. It is basically a house where three or four of the most traumatised young people in our state, kids who have been put in the too hard basket, live together with 24 hour staffing. The only thing these places guarantee is that by the time these young people leave there, they will be further traumatised. They should all be closed immediately. Paying foster carers and adoptive parents a proper wage would increase the numbers of carers available and improve the standard of care these children receive.

The costs involved in providing an effective service for our most marginalised kids would be significant.

Sure we’re outraged but do we care that much?