multifarious mushrooms

I thought I was beyond being shocked, but this engaging and secretely filmed documentary was shocking to us in the West. It isn’t about the treatment of Tibetans, but about the effects of the One Child Policy.

It was aired on the Australian ABC 4 Corners program tonight (21 April 2008)

I’ll just quote here how it is written up:

By one estimate about 70,000 children are kidnapped and sold on the black market in China each year.

Untold thousands of other people are tragically affected by the trade… this film features remarkable access to those at its core: desperate parents searching for a stolen son; a trafficker who brokers deals and who sold his own child; a young couple having to give away their newborn daughter; a private investigator who hunts for stolen children; a boy rescued from traffickers.

In modern China, baby girls can be sold for as little as $500. Boys cost $1000-plus. “China’s Stolen Children” intimately reveals the depth of this tragedy and explores the connection between child trafficking, an alarming shortage of girls and the country’s stringent birth control policy. It’s a link the Chinese Government rejects.

I always disapproved of the idea that the Chinese only wanted boys, thinking that was just a sexist practice, but this program explains why. Given that a married couple can only have one child (and they have to get a permit to do so) and there still seems to be no social security in China and no old age policies, the male child is preferred because the female child, when she gets married, goes to live with the male’s family. Hence if you have a female you have no support in old age.

People must be married (and to get married they must be over 20) and then must apply for the permission to have their one child. Of course, many children are born without those protocols being met, in which case the child will be a non-person. So the parents of those children must pay a large fine. What if they can’t pay it? They can find themselves in a situation of having to sell their child. And there are many couples who can’t have children. Supply and demand realizes the need for traffickers, who make a large cut for themselves of course. We see all this in the film.

There are other consequences of the One Child Policy. The detection of the child’s sex by scanning is illegal in China, but of course ignored for the reasons I just gave. Female foetuses are regularly aborted. Hence, there are now millions of men of marriageable age who will never find a wife.

I’ve never been a supporter of Communist China in that (though I’m a Marxist), I never considered that Mao was anything but a dictator and not the product of a socialist revolution. Mao was a Stalinist and got rid of millions of people, who might have threatened that dictatorship. The “Free World” has us believe that all Communist countries will inevitably be run by a dictator. I reject this notion.

Anyway, I was shocked because you don’t get to see much that really goes on in China. Of course, trafficking of women and children go on in other countries, but the government doesn’t seem to be addressing this problem in any way. Is the One Child Policy still viable? Is it still necessary? Why not educate the population out of the old customs of the female bride always having to go to the males family to live?

My heroes: the reporters and the Chinese people who allowed this film to be made.

If you read the post before this one, you will have read about the windiest day in Melbourne ever. In fact, we had a cyclone, although Tasmania caught the brunt of it.

I rang the SES (State Emergency Services) all day on Wednesday 2nd April when this event happened. That is, next door’s huge gum fell on our roof. It could have been a lot worse. The tree trunk hit the corner of the back of the house and I have a tin roof. I’m told if the roof had been tiles, most of these would have collapsed into the house.

The SES uses voluntary labour. I think some of the people who turned up tonight (Friday 4th) at 7.30pm had worked all day, during the day, before coming out to participate in the dangerous work they do all night.

It was very interesting to learn how they had to approach the tree which had fallen like this.

It was still attached to the trunk in next door’s yard, so it couldn’t be cut just any old way. The workers had to very careful that the part still attached to the tree trunk, remained attached for as long as possible, which meant cutting (I mean chain sawing) all the smaller limbs first on both sides of the fence.

Here is a picture of the workers contemplating how to cut the branches on my roof so that the whole thing didn’t collapse.

Here you will see my roof again with most of the smaller branches cut.

Then for the final cuts done in some way I didn’t quite understand which would minimise any further damage to the roof, weather boards and the fence.

Amazingly when the tree branch finally fell there was only a minute amount of damage and not even the fence was effected.

So 3 hours later they were finished and I promised to send my photos to the SES, which I have already done.

Every Australian loves the SES. They are used during bush fires as well as storms and floods.
But I think the government should be contributing a lot more money than they do which isn’t much. Apparently the SES began in 1935 ish as a Civil defence force.

The SES volunteers have to train and raise money for the equipment to their trucks by themselves. I certainly recommend that you donate to them.

I appreciated their work because they put themselves into possibly dangerous situations and work long hours just to help the community out. It is something I like about Australians, how they do help out in an emergency, but we should not take that for granted.

By the way, they are not all men and the work was hard. Those logs they threw off the roof were pretty heavy. There was one woman on the crew but they all helped each other and kept up safety standards.
The SES was ringing them to see why they were taking so long but as one of them said, “it was a mother of a tree.”

It has been predicted that the building of new houses will fall short of demand by 20,000 houses until 2010. With an increase of about 1/4%  in the cash rate imposed by the Reserve Bank, almost every month for the last 8 or so, people with house mortgages are defaulting on their loans. These owners go back into the rental market.

The population of Melbourne, where I live, is also growing steadily, so that Melbourne has reached the lowest rent accommodation availability in the country. Only about 1% of all housing is available for rent.

Recently, I became acutely aware of the problem when my son and his girlfriend were looking for rental property. They were having extreme difficulty in getting anything. At the same time, I heard on 774 am radio that the Drive program were doing a piece on the housing crisis and were asking for emails from people, so I emailed the program. My email got read out and it went something like this.

” My partner and I have a fully paid off house and have had one since we were in our mid 30s. We were very lucky. We were baby boomers.
Our problem now is accommodation for our son and his girlfriend. They have been living in a one bedroom flat for a year. They are now looking at 2 bedroom flats but they were too expensive or 80 people applied and some were prepared to pay more.
They have noticed since last year that the rents have gone up $20 a week for similar flats and if they stayed where they are which is no longer an option, that rent would most likely go up too.

They have a car so they are looking for a flat with car access to one of the universities and transport to the other. They go to different universities. They say, the closer to transport you are the more the rent is.

They cannot get accepted for a flat and will most likely have to return to one of their parents’ homes. You can imagine how much stress this is causing for all concerned.
They do not want to return to their parents’ homes and this parent doesn’t want them to return to this home after so much emotional adjustment to her son leaving in the first place, but of course it will be available”.

The next night the 7.30 program addressed the rental property market showing many professional couples and singles not being able to find a place, let alone those who do not have as much disposable income.

[As it turned out, my son did get a house to rent for 9 months. He and his girlfriend knew the real estate agent from school. This is why they got the house.]

I worry, of course about the next move.

In the past the State governments have erected huge towers of flats for public rental, but now these are impossible to get. The government also provides some public housing which are houses and not flats.

The house idea worked with no-one else needing to know that their neighbours are renting at a lower rate due to it being a public house, but the high rise towers brought with them ghetto type living standards, with all the expected social problems.

We need more public housing immediately because otherwise parents and children will be living with each other for the foreseeable future, except for the rich who can afford to buy flats for their offspring. That might apply to kids who get on well with their parents. Otherwise I can see homelessness increasing astronomically.

I do wish I knew too how owners and investors decide on their tenants, because there seems to be no rhyme nor reason for their decisions.

What is my life coming to when I don’t read newspapers anymore. Of course one reason is that there is only the usual non-investigative journalism in them or that the opinion pieces are so right wing that they aren’t worth reading. But I guess being a Melburnian I’ll always check out “The Age”. I’ve just discovered a loophole here too, electronically. As a librarian, I know that old Ages cannot be accessed without paying, but if you subscribe to the feed, some articles remain.
You can subscribe to about 6 different feeds.

http://theage.com.au/rsschannels/

A few years ago, the talking point on radio was about two different cases of teachers having sex with underage school kids.

This happened in Victoria, Australia.

One case was about a man who was married and a PE teacher in a school. He was charged with sexual penetration with a minor (a girl). He was sentenced to 2 years minimum in jail.

Then there was a female teacher who also had sex with an underage student. She was charged and got a 3 year suspended sentence.

Both of them will never be able to work with children again and both are on the sex offenders list.

So, much was made of a seeming contradiction, with radio presenters saying that in her case if she’d been a man she would have been sentenced to jail.

I don’t agree.

I might add here that as a teacher I knew of both male and female teachers having sex with their students and was appalled by both genders involved in this sort of activity.

None of them ever got caught or were charged. The “victims” never brought charges.

I’ve known a male teacher who ended up marrying one of his students.

Are those “victims” traumatized. I guess they weren’t. They were usually in their final year and about to leave school.

But I still disapprove.

So back to the female who only got a suspended jail term. Her lawyer said there were lots of extenuating circumstances, one of which was that the boy initiated the relationship and said he never felt like a victim. But there were clearly others which we as the public don’t know about because we were not at the court case.

There’s no doubt that I became attracted to many of my older male students and they may have been attracted to me also, but I just had that ” taboo ” thought in my head all the time.

But do I think jail is appropriate? That depends on the age of the victim and the nature of the sexual relationship. Was the victim way too young, making it pedophilia, or was the older girl really touched in very unwanted ways. That’s different from consensual sex between older and younger people.

As for being in a position of trust and abusing that trust? They should be sacked for doing so. But not all cases can be equated with pedophilia.

Interested in your view however….