100 days of Love and Hate - Day 12

[dalekboy]

Puppy smell
There's not a lot of detail I can go into about this one. I love the smell of young pups. I think it just ties into a lot of feelings from my childhood. Growing up with anywhere between 3 and 7 dogs around, there were often puppies, crawling around whining with their little blunt heads and blind eyes.

Inexplicable beyond that, but I love that scent to this day.




Long-term planning
Or rather the lack thereof, from people 'in charge'. A prime example is our politicians and big business, who look only towards short term goals, with no thought of future consequences. A more personal example is what I call 'event fandom', whose plans revolve around the next big convention, with no thought or care about what's to happen between big cons, or to the after effects. But that's another post entirely.

Dams in some country areas are at 14% and it's now that various governments are talking about how to deal with this problem. As we enter the eighth year of drought. Call me strange if you want, but I would have gotten this stuff going around four or five years in. At that point you have to start asking yourself how long it's going to go for. Yes, it may rain next year, but what if it's another five years? And even if it does rain, starting to get an infrastructure in place for long-term drought solutions in Australia makes sense. But our government always think about the farmers last, never stopping to think about what happens when too many farmers pack it in and we have to bring the majority of our food in from elsewhere.

Even as I write this, in order to deal with the housing situation, the arible land around our coastal areas is getting turned into housing, pushing farmers further and further into the interior with it's lower rainfalls.

In Melbourne they are talking about having people making 20% of their trips using public transport by 2020. Great, except that our public transport is already running at capacity, even with the government subsidising 60% of the cost it's over-priced, and none of the planning is looking to dealing with the reasons why people don't use PT in the first place.

Everything is centralised around the Melbourne CBD, it's fine if you're heading into or out of the city, but if you wish to go two suburbs over, it's difficult and time consuming. It's less stressful to take the car, but as petrol prices increase, even that's less affordable.

And don't get me started on our involvement in the war...

The Iroquois confederacy has a rule that chiefs make their decisions by thinking seriously about what the effects will be seven generations down the track. I think the world would be a much better place if all our leaders thought this way.

Comments

[leebattersby.livejournal.com]

No government will ever undertake a decision-making process that involves a theoretical endpoint later than the theoretical endpoint of that Government's reign, because they're so desparate never to let "the other mob" get any free credit for things they've put into place. No political party in this country ever thinks more than 3 or 4 years into the future as a result.

And I don't fancy the odds of ever seeing a party set something into motion with an attitude of "Know what? Even if we get voted out at the last election, we trust the other guys to give us the credit when this scheme hits paydirt."

The soul of democracy involves a compromise with political expediency.

[dalekboy.livejournal.com]

And that's half the problem, people care more about getting credit than doing what needs to be done.

It's one of the things I liked about Bracks when he first came in. On several occasions he actually publically recognised the positive stuff that Kennett had done, as well as the negative. It was really refreshing to see.

Urban sprawl

[lilysea.livejournal.com]

Ditto on long-term planning.

I got *so angry* when John Howard was talking about urban sprawl the other day:

"I think we do have to be willing to see an even greater urban sprawl, of course we do," Howard said. "Deep down the desire of young Australians still when they have children is to have a back yard. I'm a great believer in that old Australian ideal of having a back yard for your children to run around in and that is what the young of Australia now want and we have to find a way of accommodating that."

What about people who need to be close to hospitals/schools? People without a car? Low-income people who need affordable inner-city housing so they can get to their jobs (or would he rather that Sydney end up like London, where some suburbs simply cannot get cleaners because people doing cleaning jobs cannot *afford* to live within a decent commute of some suburbs)? What about the cost of building infrastructure for the new suburbs - libraries, primary schools, hospitals, Post Offices and so on? What about the cost of public transport? What about the cost to the environment - all those backyards Howard endorses consume a lot of water.

Re: Urban sprawl

[lilysea.livejournal.com]

Which is to say - cities need more affordable medium-density housing - for low income earners, pensioners, unemployed people, students, single people. Not everyone wants to, or can afford to, live in a 3-4 bedroom house on a quarter-acre block.

[possbert.livejournal.com]

Mmmm...puppy smell. I also like the smell of horses - of all hoofstock, come to that. During a visit to the UK a few years back I called into a couple of zoos (Chester and Whipsnade) and must have looked a right 'nana as I stood outside the ungulate enclosure sucking up the fumes.

Most carnivores, Painted Dogs and otters to be specific, on the other hand do not smell nice.

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

I smell horses and I think of the Royal Show.

[possbert.livejournal.com]

Agreed! That was always my favourite part of the Show - you can keep your rides and your showbags, I wanted the baby animals and cows and horses. And the cat pavillion.