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What the world needs now is love
Bunbury is just a couple of hours drive south of Perth, down the unusually named Kwinana highway, and it is in Bunbury that the Western Australia’s latest attraction can be found. A new “space age” public toilet at Koombana Bay beach welcomes visitors through a sound system and then plays a version of Burt Bacharach’s tune; What the World Needs Now is Love. How splendid is that?
Some unsupportive people have taken umbrage at the spending of $250,000 on the new toilet, the Sunday Times reporting that, at the same time this is happening, 3 percent is being cut from State expenditure in areas like the health service. It turns out however that the funding for the new toilet comes from petroleum royalties earmarked for regional initiatives and this is just one of them; along with 80 fibreglass cows in Margaret River and a few golf carts down at the Boolbardie Country Club.
It seems just a distant memory but was only a week ago that the land of the long white cloud was sighted through the window of flight DJ60 from Melbourne to Christchurch. And it was a timely visit. The first item on the radio news was an announcement by the seventy-two-year-old Jim Anderton that he would be standing for the Christchurch mayoralty, his impending campaign the perfect prompt to ponder a return. And that’s not to forget a grandson who insists on calling his grandfather grandma, a goddaughter who has had to find an assistant godparent to compensate for an absence and, of course, Kaelene trimming the buxus hedges to within an inch of their lives just to ensure the place looked familiar.
And mostly Christchurch did look uncannily familiar. The airport is still a dog’s breakfast and the billboards explaining the painfully slow reconstruction process which read Change is Good, are unconvincing. Down the road from home, the Beckenham shops have been bowled over and replaced with a new block of functionary buildings, thankfully they still retain Tandoori Palace the second best Indian food outside of India to GoGo’s Madras Curry House in Perth. At the University of Canterbury most of the experienced and best qualified library staff are being sacked to make way for digital replacements. It seems that in the new world order librarians, including a head librarian, aren’t really needed to run a library, the irony being that, despite the unstoppable move towards information technology, IT staff are also being shed by the university. The once-called Lancaster Park, now AMI Stadium, has been reconstructed and looks fantastic but is being blandly re-branded Stadium Christchurch for the Rugby World Cup. Whatever is wrong with Lancaster Park?
Almost as quickly as the trip began it was over. Air New Zealand to Auckland, a brisk walk to the international terminal and a seven hour flight back to Western Australia to find that mining magnates, each worth billions of dollars, are moaning about a proposed new tax on “super-profits” for mining companies and one of those magnates, Gina Reinhart, reportedly the richest woman in Australia, is calling on the Government to cut award wages for immigrant mine workers so they can be hired more cheaply than locals, of which there is no shortage. It’s as if she needs more money.
Closer to home, the owner of The Basement, an inconspicuous and usually empty bar across the road from work has been murdered allegedly at the hands of his bar manager. Curiously the manager was sacked but not charged and given that degree of liberty has taken the opportunity to flee interstate. The State Premier is reportedly furious.
And even close to home, there was a sighting in the backyard last night, the curious mix of a gorilla, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and a pug now named Toto.