One Week in Melbourne

Two items dominate the local media in Melbourne this week. The disappearance of an Irish girl last Friday night and the sacking of a school principle. The fact the two stories get almost equal coverage in the posher end of the media market is a little sad but speaks volumes for what is important to middle class Melbournians.

 

The school mistress story broke first. Rosa Storelli was the principle of Melbourne’s prestigious Methodist Ladies College until she was fired two weeks ago. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a few Methodists in my time and as Protestants go, they are the best of the bunch. They are humble and keen to help the poor, which by all accounts is why they left the Anglican faith in the first place.

 

Clearly no one has passed this message onto the people who run Methodist Ladies College. They charge $23,000 a year in tuition fees and attract the offspring of lawyers, doctors and various other social climbers. No doubt they throw out the odd scholarship to an aboriginal kid or a child genius from the poorer Western Suburbs, but the school is a factory to perpetuate social class and to ensure that the female lawyers and doctors of tomorrow are the children of today’s lawyers and doctors.

 

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bother me. The world is an unfair place after all. But as with Ireland, the Australian government pays the same subsidy per pupil to fee paying schools as it does to state schools. And in both countries, capital expenditure on gyms, libraries etc are based on a matched payment basis. If the school can come up with $100k, then the government will match it. Needless to say, this means that the rich schools get most of the money and the inequity gap gets wider.

 

Right wingers complain about paying taxes to fund dole payments to layabouts. Well, I have the same problem in paying taxes to subsidise the education of the elite and to pay for the Australian militaries’ misadventures in Afghanistan. If we were all able to direct our taxes to the places we thought they should be best spent, then I reckon we’d have good schools and hospitals, ten members of parliament instead of hundreds and an army presence in the Middle East that would fit into a phone box.

 

The head involved got sacked after the school board discovered that they had overpaid her by about half a million dollars over the last ten years and she refused to pay it back. In fairness she probably hadn’t noticed the overpayment as her salary is also half a million dollars a year. And to think I passed up on teacher training college because I didn’t think the pay was good enough.

 

The principle and the school board are busy leaking information to the media every day and mediation councillors have been called in. The pupils must be laughing. In my day, a headmaster getting sacked would have caused great levity among the masses and a new catalogue of nicknames.

The parents however, seem to be fairly solidly behind the ex principle. A fighting fund has been organised and the city’s best legal brains (who coincidently are also parents in this case) are talking about taking a High Court case to get her reinstated. All of this makes the front page of Melbourne’s broadsheet newspaper each day and must baffle the vast majority of citizens, for whom $23,000 is annual income.

 

The other thing that this throws up is that if a school discovers that it has been overpaying it’s principle for the past ten years, you’d have to wander about the standard of bookkeeping that they are teaching their students.

 

I had the dubious pleasure of auditing a school back in my early working life. It was run by an order of Priests who covered the full gambit of religious stereotypes. The youngest Priest on the management committee was committed to social justice and argued the case of the school caretaker who was earning a wage equivalent to that of a Bombay street beggar. The young Priest was looking to get him an extra twenty pounds a week in his take home pay. The head master, who came from the pre Vatican Two tradition of the Catholic Church, tutted dismissively and explained that because of the penal tax and national insurances rates that existed in Ireland at the time, the school would be required to find 50 pounds per week to pay a net twenty and this was simply out of the question.

 

They looked to me for a suggestion and I swallowed my socialist pride for a moment. I told them to get the caretaker to give a note each week saying that he bought twenty pounds worth of nails or paint and seeking reimbursement. They could then pay him this amount without any implications for tax and insurance. The young Priest beamed with enthusiasm but they headmaster stared at me with a face as dark as thunder. Suddenly my heart fell as I realised I had just explained an illegal scheme to a group of clerics.

 

“That’s brilliant” he said.”Can we do the same for all the staff?”

 

I learned a lesson that day, that schools are not the paradigm of virtue that we think them to be and yet we entrust them to educate our young and to set them on a moral path.

 

There is nothing moral about charging $23,000 a year to school a kid or to pay a principle half a million a year in my book.

 

The other issue that has filled the papers was the disappearance and murder of a young Irish girl called Jill Meagher. She was snatched from the street not far from where I live and discovered six days later in a shallow grave. It is a desperately sad story and makes me wish that the papers were only filled with tales of sacked headmistresses and the angst of middle class parents.

 

 

Do We Exist?

Scientists would have you believe that the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is on a par with the  unearthing of penicillin or the first moon landing, although the God Particle, as it is known, is unlikely to ease the pain of venereal disease or create conspiracy theories about the moon’s dark side.

In fact, it’s not a discovery at all, more a confirmation of what scientists already theorised, or perhaps it is just a simple justification for all the money they spent on the large hadron collider at a time when they should have been investing this money in the more honourable adventure of bailing out banks.

Science is the art of studying the behaviour of 15,000 people to discover what you already know or suspected. For example, you will never see a report on research by the University of Arkansas into childhood obesity, which says that to their great surprise, sugar and a lack of exercise is actually good for kids.

Last month the American National Institute on Aging released the results of a twenty five year study into the effect of eating less on aging. They raised a colony of rhesus monkeys (they are the ugly ones who like to steal tourists water bottles in India) and fed half of them a normal diet while treating the rest to a quantity of food that would not look out of place on a Supermodel’s plate.

They discovered that eating less makes absolutely no difference to how long you live. This was a great disappointment to the report’s author who no doubt was looking forward to a long career in the lucrative diet industry.

Needless to say, it came as great news to those of us who are slenderly challenged. But it does prove that scientific studies are carried out to prove things the scientists already suspected. Which makes you wonder how they ever discover anything new in the first place.

So when they dug that big hole in Switzerland and built the Hadron collider, they had a pretty good idea what they were going to find. Either that or the plan was just to keep a few hundred Irish builders in work.

The major achievement of Higgs Boson appears to be the proof that mass can be created out of nothing.  Energy shares space in Einstein’s famous little formula with mass, dangling out there on the left, like a hallucinating drug trying to get into a rave party. Energy can also be created out of nothing. Imagine you are tired after a hard week at work. You want to hit the sofa with a takeaway and a brain numbing night in with a derivative reality TV show for company. You feel like you don’t have the energy to make it to the toilet and contemplate fashioning a colostomy bag from the various crisp packets that litter your sitting room.

Then a text message arrives from a friend inviting you to the pub. For the formula to work it has to be a particular friend who makes you laugh and encourages you to have one for the road at 3am. Everybody has one of these acquaintances who possess a pied piper ability to lure you to the pub when you would refuse all others. You may not realise it, but you are probably that person in somebody else’s life.

Once the message arrives, you will discover that an instant infusion of energy results and before you know where you are, you are skipping down the road like a Duracell battery on acid.

You’ll probably wake in a molten mess on your living room floor with the remnants of a kebab knotted into your hair. And you’ll wonder where you found the energy to party the night before.

So if mass and energy can be created out of nothing, then the speed of light must also be nothing. That’s the third element of Einstein’s theory and if my old Maths teacher thought me anything, it is that if two elements of a three part equation are zero, then the third element must also be zero. And the square root of zero is also zero. Did you get all that?

This raises a few questions. If the speed of light can be created from nothing, then we don’t need the sun. This means that the sun probably doesn’t exist and this is all a dream. That shiny yellow thing I saw in the sky this morning was an orange perhaps and what passes for the moon is actually some cream cheese.

If the sun doesn’t exist, then perhaps we don’t exist either. Funnily enough, that was a conversation I used to regularly have in the pub with a friend of mine who had an uncanny knack of luring me into drinking establishments. He was a shrink who believed that nothing was real and if there was any existence at all, it was only in the realm of the unconscious or in an infinite layer of parallel universes. I found myself always arguing that we did actually exist. This went on for many years until we realised that by having the argument in the first place, we were actually proving my point.  

It would of course be easier if we didn’t exist but thought we did. I wouldn’t have to worry about my weight for example and could avoid reading obscure scientific studies to try and glean a slither of justification for my calorie guzzling lifestyle.

We need answers I think. Can light and speed be created from nothing? Does the sun exist? Do I exist? Is there a logical reason why McDonalds put gherkins in Big Macs when nobody likes them?

I have my theories but I have no proof. However, if somebody will give me 10 billion Euros and a large round hole in Switzerland, I’m confident I can come up with some answers and they will be exactly what I suspected in the first place.