Raise Your Glasses and Welcome Wine Groover

TODAY, Jeff and I launch a new website promoting Australian boutique wines and wineries.  No better day than Australia Day to do it.

Wine Groover  at winegroover.com will bring the stories of the smaller independent vineyards and the winemakers in Australia to wine enthusiasts.

A nice way to see the world: thru a glass of  Ravens Croft Viognier

We are introducing you to the best of Australian wines made by Australian families.

Not only that, we are telling Australians about wines that are intriguing, hard to get, and desirable. Wines you want to be first to try and then tell your friends about them.

 

We’re focusing on telling a story – what is unique and special about each winery, its winemakers, and the wines.   We’re not from the wine industry, but are historians, communicators and story tellers.

Wine Groover is created partly out of admiration for small Australian winemakers. These winemakers and vintners are Australians who aren’t afraid to try out some nifty innovative techniques, and produce something that knocks the socks off the rest of the world.

Perhaps wine is the greatest of all Australia’s products. Our winemakers use the best of our ingenuity and inventiveness to grow outstanding fruit, and squeeze and tweak out some glorious wines.

Thomas Honnef from Oceanview Estate

The first winery to be featured will be Oceanview Estates at Mount Mee in Queensland, and winemaker Thomas Honnef.

Wine Groover will post a story each week about Australian boutique wineries and wine releases, and aims to visit as many vineyards as possible to get the stories first hand.

Wines cannot be sold through this website under Queensland law and Wine Groover will direct wine drinkers directly to the website of the wineries for purchases.

Wine Groover is myself (Chris Whiting) and close friend Jeff Hopkins-Weise who I have recruited to be a Creative Partner.  Jeff did not have to be asked twice.

Jeff and I met studying Australian History and the University of Queensland in 1992.  It was a year of shared group housing, the pursuit of unobtainable girls, and drinking cheap wine late into the night.

  

Maybe the desire to discover the best and most intriguing Australian wines dates from those carousing sessions.

You can find Wine Groover at www.winegroover.com or follow “WineGroover” on Facebook and Twitter, or mail us at info@winegroover.com.

Job Cuts to Continue in 2013

PUBLIC SERVANTS in Queensland must be dreading coming back to work after Christmas.  There is a growling fear that the public service will continue, literally, to be decimated throughout the year.

Roman legionnaires: hoping for a good day and a centurion who can't count

Decimation was a process used to discipline Roman legions or cohorts that failed miserably in the face of battle.  Every tenth man was selected to be killed, so as to send a message to his fellow legionnaires.

There was no rhyme or reason: you were selected for execution if your number came after “nine” on parade that day.  Workers on George Street must be familiar with the process.

The process of chopping away at public service numbers will continue right through 2013, extending the dominant narrative of “job losses” in Queensland politics right up until the election year.

Truly, perhaps, a death by a thousand cuts.

What must be surprising to the former councillors in charge of the Queensland government is how long it actually takes to get rid of 14,000 people.  

Tim Nicholls was interviewed on ABC Radio on Friday.  If we carefully dissect what he said, we can discern that the abattoir work will creep on in 2013.

The Queensland treasurer said that 7,500 state public sector positions have been amputated so far.  But hey!  The pain is almost over as the final number won’t be 14,000.

The “real” number of job losses will be about 10,000 in total, he said.  The remaining 4,000 are “unfilled positions” or “short term contracts about to end”.

Campbell Newman, Premier of Queensland

He may be intimating that it is not “real” people losing their jobs, but that is not so.

Public service job losses will still be about 14,000.  Getting rid of “unfilled positions” or not renewing short term contracts still means workers and voters losing their jobs.

An unfilled position could be someone’s substantive position, which is a vacant position where the person employed in that job fills in a job higher up the chain.  Or the workplace has been “re-organised” to move someone on.

In any case, an “unfilled position” is no accident.  It is a device designed to get rid of costs, or represents job cutting moves already happening.

Not renewing short term contracts is the biggie. 

Many people who have joined the public service in last few years have been on short term contracts, not employed as permanent employees.  Whole units within departments are substantially filled with people on contracts.

These are “real” workers who have not done anything wrong and perform crucial front-line work. Yet they will go because they are easy to sack.  That’s why they were put on short term contracts in the first place.

So there is still more pain to come.  14,000 will go, in some form or another, and we are only half way through the job cuts.

And the final rounds of dismissals, redundancies or sackings will be long, slow and painful.  For everyone, including the LNP government.

One, it will be difficult selecting which positions must go.  The “low-hanging” fruit has already been picked, and the next cuts must come from workers performing the embedded core functions at work.

Two, public service bosses will be reluctant to keep slashing.

To be continually sacking people who are their work colleagues is genuinely distressing.

What’s more, the power and ranking of a public service boss is measured by the number of staff in their department.

They will find every which way to cut costs and keep staff, if they can.  In many ways, they will be deferring the hard decisions.

So don’t be surprised is the big political story in Queensland this year will continue to be job cuts and service cuts.

It will take a long time, and means the narrative of “job cuts” will be the one you see in the media for the rest of 2013.

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Brisbane's Bonds of Empire

WHAT LIES within the legislation program of the Queensland government in 2013?

According to the Queensland Attorney-General, we may be passing laws to tighten the bonds of Empire.

Our future of head of State (somewhere behind the flowers)

The Queensland Attorney-General wants to bring in an Act to nominate the unborn child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to be a subsequent Head of State in Queensland.  The Federal government may be doing the same.

Let us pause and consider the long term implications of this rush to solidify the links to Empire.

Do we want to legislate that an unknown Englishman or woman will be the font of authority in our democracy in about 50 years time?

Many Queenslanders feel we will get nothing from being attached to the British Crown.  In fact, it is an attachment that has always entailed a significant cost.

Startlingly, I found this very sentiment reflected by Benjamin Franklin in 1775.

Franklin had spent months trying to negotiate with the British government to avoid war in the American colonies.  As Don Cook says in The Long Fuse, Benjamin Franklin became disgusted by the "futility of his efforts" and the continued British attempts at bribery.

Here’s what Franklin said:

When I consider the extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this old rotten state … I cannot but apprehend more mischief than benefit from a closer union.  I fear they will drag us after them in all plundering wars which their desperate circumstances, injustices and rapacity may prompt them to undertake; and their wide-wasting prodigality and profusion is a gulf that will swallow up every aid we may distress ourselves to afford them.

Benjamin Franklin: still relevant today

These are the rapier-like words of a man whose nation was about to launch into a colonial war. Yet they have a real resonance with Australia in the 21^st century.

One phrase that leaps out is “swallow up every aid”.  It is what happened to Australia in the 20th century.

After World War II, Australians endured rationing for years as we sent our grain, meat and butter to England to relieve their paucity of food.

Yet the biggest aid we have always sent the English was ourselves.  In uniform.

“ … drag us after them into all plundering wars …” is a line that should send a thrill of recognition through nearly all Australians.

Most of the tens of thousands of Australians who have perished in war have died fighting under the British flag, not the Australian flag.

And although not plundering wars, they were wars of Empire that gave us no benefit.

The Australians who served in wars in Sudan and South Africa helped deliver an African empire to the British Crown.

And The Great War, a war that transformed our nation as much as any other event, was an avoidable clash of European empires within Europe.

The supply of men in uniform to fight the wars of Empire was what the British government really needed from Australia.  To make sure we were up for the job, Lord Kitchener toured Australia before World War I and assessed our military preparedness for colonial adventures.

Pick who is enjoying the "bonds of empire" here.

And when we ultimately needed our military, they were tied up under a British flag, half a world away.

Our airmen were in the air over Europe, inexorably embedded in the Royal Air Force.  When we needed our own air force above our own troops in New Guinea, we had to rely on American aircraft and American airmen.

It is our experience at the forge of war that makes Australians truly question if our system of government should be hinged upon a British monarchy.

One Australian Prime Minister saw the bonds of Empire through the prism of that war-time experience.

In 1992, Paul Keating addressed in Parliament Opposition “charges” that he had snubbed and insulted the Queen.  Echoing Benjamin Franklin, he said:

I learned about self-respect and self-regard for Australia – not about some cultural cringe to a country which decided not to defend the Malayan peninsula, not to worry about Singapore and not to give us our troops back to keep ourselves free from Japanese domination.  This was the country that you people wedded yourselves to, and, even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you were still looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it.

It’s a speech delivered like a mace more so than a rapier, but many get that same rush of recognition.  It articulates a sense the British Empire has got much more out of us than we have from it.

So why are we running to bind ourselves once again to the British Crown?  Why not let future generations decide if they want the child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to be our Head of State?

They can assess whether, as Ben Franklin said, there is any benefit from a closer union with this European nation and its ruling family.

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