Posts by Joe Wylie
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OnPoint: Fiscal Responsibility is the…, in reply to Nat,
Has anyone demonstrated that GST -free fresh food has increased its consumption, in Australia or elsewhere, relative to non-fresh food?
The Australian exemption's for food, fresh or otherwise, so their experience isn't likely to provide any useful data. No GST on food was a condition of a deal cut by John Howard with the now-extinct Australian Democrats, who then held the balance of power in the Federal Senate.
I remember that such frivolities as alcohol and confectionery were excluded. The casualties were the makers of borderline products such as specialty ice cream, whose goodies wound up being classed as lollies, while the big tubs of Streets somehow became GST-free food.
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Up Front: Absence in the Arcades, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
So the illusion of life flickers on in Chchch,
we ain’t popped our sprockets yet…...thanks to the persistence of vision?
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Thanks Hilary, sorry I was unduly harsh, especially as I've enjoyed your kindness and generosity here in the past.
The Levin centre, by whatever name, was being slowly expanded when I left all those decades ago. I'd assumed it was simply an upgrade and replacement of the run-down and recycled former borstal and air force base. When I checked the Google Earth map a couple of years back I confess that I was shocked. What were those huge structures in what had been open fields? What on earth had they been thinking of back in the (presumably) 1970s? So yes, I understand and share your revulsion.
While I try to be conscious that my views may be subject to a certain fuzzy nostalgia, I believe that it's not a matter of whether or not my parents were good people, but that a genuinely caring culture once existed in a place with such a blighted history.
I don't know if the empire building element was there at the time the place was established. It certainly didn't appear to be a driving force in the years I recall. There was a sense of progress, of improving the lot of people in care. Part of this would have come from medical advances. For example cretinism and hydrocephaly, of which there were a number of sufferers among the original inmates, were either eliminated or brought under control.
If social attitudes to disability had been viewed as similar evils to be overcome then presumably people would have been provided with the care they needed as the place devolved. Was this ever the guiding belief under which the place operated? I really don't know, but I believe there was certainly an element of progressive thinking back then. I have a few ideas about who the genuine progressives were, and I believe that some real achievements were made in terms of patient welfare, often in the face of an intransigent bureaucracy.
The last time I drove through the grounds at Levin was in the early 80s. I was shocked at how run down the place had become, with residents appearing to wander aimlessly. It was probably the first time that I realised that progress isn't a given, that it's something that we have to strive for.
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Sacha:
The political fragmentation after de-institutionalisation is something I haven’t seen discussed much.
Not quite sure if I follow you with ‘political’, but a sad experience for me was visiting some of the former Levin inmates in the 80s, after the place had been run down and they’d been moved to a Salvation Army home. As Kate said about Tokanui, the institution had provided them with a community, and they seemed so bereft and abandoned.
Thanks Kate, appreciate that. My parents are gone now, but in my mother’s last years I discovered a lot that would have escaped me as a child. For example, which of the medical superintendents had been real progressives, who was responsible for what initiatives, and which of those succeeded or failed. It gave a bit of structure to my recollections. Not much of that is reflected in the Donald Beasley accounts, it sometimes feels as if it’s all been sealed and signed off by those who know best.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Sacha,
The things that make inhumane systems survivable often come down to good humans doing what they can.
The inhumane system was the wider society that ostracised the disabled. In that context, for around two-and-a-half decades Levin wasn’t some kind of gulag.
I think it's also fair to claim that genuine progress was made there, although it's hardly likely to be acknowledged any time soon. For example, what was once my family home was turned into accommodation for parents and family of inmates after we moved on.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I'm really glad that there were nice people like your family in those places.
Hilary, you're not only being patronising and condescending, you're failing to accord me the courtesy of assuming that I'm posting here in good faith.
I am NOT motivated by a need to justify my family's involvement. To suggest that I am makes me sound like the apologist offspring of someone who had a menial role at Auschwitz. My parents were minor functionaries in a system that they didn't choose to join. I want to understand how that system fits into our history, and it's been my fortune to have rather more to draw from than abstract reports. They weren't perfect people, but I don't believe that they ever mistreated those that it was their duty to care for. Certainly they weren't activists in breaking up families for the greater glory of the health system.
I remember as a child asking my mother if every inmate at Levin was classed according to some kind of syndrome - Downs, microcephalic, etc. She told me that the vast majority were classed as 'feeble minded', and it was pretty clear that even back then she found it a pretty awful label to put on a fellow human.
Of course you can "oppose the policy and language", and I applaud your doing so. To some extent it appears to be the work you've chosen, which wasn't the case for my 18-year-old manpowered-into-the-job mother, who somehow managed to deal with such things as the little boy at Templeton with a tapeworm hanging out of his bum.
Levin was very much an initiative of then-health Minister Mabel Howard to deliver people from that kind of squalor. Having been involved in raising someone with a supposed intellectual disability I have some awareness of the social issues. I also have some experience of the history of such things. It's simply wrong, and a touch self-serving, to characterise the whole 'psychopaedic' era as an exercise in cold-hearted self-interest from top to bottom.
The dehumanised bureaucratic attitude has always been there, just as it sadly is today. We also have a proud humanitarian tradition that we ignore at our cost. If we stopped congratulating ourselves we might notice that we regularly jail and criminalise people with real disabilities. Perhaps we don't recognise them because by the time the system has dealt to them they don't strike us as particularly nice.
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Hard News: Walking upright again, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
The Real Cathedral Square
Time warp! A bit over to the right and you'd have seen the old soldier who sold Golden Kiwi tickets from a little table outside the post office.
I remember an eyewitness account of a daylight robbery where "a horrible bodgie, a great dumb club" snatched the raffle ticket seller's cash bag. When the old guy gave chase the villain "drew a fourteen-inch crescent (shifting spanner) out of his boot and clubbed the old fella over the head" before being overpowered by a bunch of cockies.
I was starting to join the dots until I realised that Brownlee would have been around twelve at the time.
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Hard News: Walking upright again, in reply to Hebe,
Thanks Hebe, agree 100%.
I really don't get what Brownlee's trying to achieve, beyond indulging in a bit of philistine triumphalism. It seems to be a bit of an own goal at this stage of the election campaign.The 1950s extension to Mountfort's museum shows that old buildings can be sensitively modified and enhanced, but even if this was put back as it was I wouldn't want to spend time in there.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Joe – ‘mental deficiency colonies’ was official government language of the 1950s for psychopaedic institutions so I’m pleased to hear those on the ground didn’t use that term.
Hilary, while we find the term objectionable today, please consider that it would have been common currency back then among people who were probably every bit as progressive and humanitarian as you are now, in the context of their time. For all any of us know, future generations may be similarly judgmental of our present use of autism and associated terms.
Naturally I’ve tried to discover what I can about what really went on in the world I witnessed for the first seventeen years of my life. While I appreciate that the book is now somehow officially closed, I believe that you’d have found more than a few fellow spirits in those genuinely reformist years before the empire building mentality set in. A pity that their stories will never be told.
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Hard News: Walking upright again, in reply to Tamsin6,
. . . the Cathedral has been issued with a demolition notice. OMFG.
If there’s a deliberate strategy behind how this news has been broken it’s hard to fathom.
No nice guy Roger Sutton simpering woodenly after having taken a big gulp from the poisoned chalice. Just Brownlee, boots ’n all and making with the name-calling already. The same Brownlee who back in March said:
he would like to see resources go into re-building the Christchurch Cathedral, the Catholic Basilica, the Provincial Chambers and the Arts Centre – “but that’s it”.
“There will be a few others perhaps, but those would be the most iconic buildings that Christchurch residents would want to see rebuilt.
“They won’t be put back the way they were. They will need to have a great deal of strengthening put into them and it will be quite a long consideration as to how those things might be done."
While the blunt serving of a demolition notice on the Anglicans is no doubt part of the chronically risk-averse CERA’s legal requirements, it’s a huge slap in the public face to break the news that way. The cathedral may belong to the Anglicans, but iconic considerations aside it’s had massive material support from the state, and has long served as a venue for a whole range of secular functions.