Lockdown Missive #13

Friday 6 August 2021

Hello all,

Well, here we are. Again, again. Where to begin, where to end? At 80% immunisation if Scotty can get his big boy pants on and do the job he’s meant to do. At a press conference yesterday (the one where he ducked every question about the outrageous commuter car park rorts before getting cranky and ending the conference—what leadership!), Scotty came up with a gem worthy of remembrance in the annals of history:

“Every single day, every single day, the percentage of those vaccinated in this country increases.”

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Inspiring, #ScottyfromTruisms.

But I digress. It’s just difficult to look at—and indeed to live through—the current situation without scorn for our federal political leaders. They receive expert modelling telling them that vaccinating young people is the key to returning to some sort of normality, yet we can’t even get a vaccine. We were ‘phase 3’ before the government royally stuffed everything up and even many in the original phase 1a and 1b groups—meant to be fully vaccinated by May—aren't yet vaccinated.  Aged care facilities have distressingly low vaccination rates among staff, months after deadly outbreaks and government promises of vaccination access for all. 

We’ve had “four-phase plans”, “new deals”, “pathways”, “targets” and “allocation horizons”, yet we’re still ranked 37/38 OECD nations for vaccinations and we’re a long way off returning to anything like ‘normal’. Now, I’m the first to admit I’ve got my own partisan axe to grind, yet if Tony Abbott felt the pink batts “scandal” (and its four tragic albeit atypical deaths) required a very political Royal Commission to investigate alleged impropriety (finding not very much wrong at all), I think we need a standing Royal Commission to investigate not only the greatest policy failures in recent history in the Commonwealth’s COVID response, but the last 8 years of graft, corruption and mismanagement.

Just a thought.


Things that have been going on

Right, now that I’ve got that off my chest, here are the kids doing kid things. Since my last kind of missive in February, We Have Done Things. In keeping with the “there’s no time like the present” attitude to life snap lockdowns engender, we’ve been to Bright, visited every zoo multiple times, gone on long walks, started a new job, visited Canberra, ridden a steam train, made a couple of photo books and more. Lots of exciting stuff!


Bright and surrounds

I may have pictures with some of you but it was a real delight getting away to my favourite place in all Australia earlier in the year. March may be only a few months ago on the calendar but it feels like an age ago. Like most things, doing them with the kids ever-present was a challenge but it was nonetheless enjoyable and somewhat restorative to get away from Melbourne. We visited Harrietville, Mt Beauty and even made it to the Wandi Pub and enjoyed one of the most delicious steaks on record (and enjoyed a brew or two).


Misc. weekend activities

When we’ve not been locked down, we’ve been doing our usual act of visiting zoos and parks and basically anything at all to get through the weekends in one piece. We visited the animatronic dinosaurs at the zoo right up until they left in May (a much-extended stay due to COVID) and have made the most of our time out and about.

In April, rail preservation group Steamrail ran a series of steam-hauled shuttle services between Flinders Street and Sandringham station. The kids, naturally, loved that and loved being able to stick their heads out open carriage windows (though they didn’t love the requisite cinders in eyes). 

And the LEGO nerd known as “Brickman” put on an exhibition of Jurassic World dinosaurs at the Melbourne Convention Centre, all made from LEGO. 


New job

I think it was this time last year, at the peak of Victoria’s second wave, that I’d had about enough of my job. I said something to the effect of “my worry isn’t now ‘what if my lose my job?’ but rather ‘what happens if I’m still employed three months from now AND still working from home?’”. Stop me if you’ve heard this before but full-time work and full-time parenting from home was fecking difficult. However these weeks and months of looooooong days, stupid workloads, unrealistic expectations and little support galvanised me: I didn’t want to go through this again. And so, I started job hunting. Not full-on dawn-to-dusk job applications (because as anyone under 40 knows, applying for jobs is a full-time job in and of itself) but just applying for jobs that piqued my interest. As usual with these sorts of things, you receive unsolicited calls from recruiters who think you’d be an ’ideal candidate’ for their dental products company and earn only automated rejection emails from jobs you’d actually be perfect for.

All this changed when I saw a recruiter-posted ad for the role of senior copywriter at an ’award-winning broadcast/TV/video’ company based in Port Melbourne. Well, I knew of only one company that fit that bill: Blackmagic Design. And, sure enough, it was. Now I spend my days crafting copy (that’s the words that go in things like brochures, flyers, on websites, in social media etc.) for some of the best film and TV hardware and software in the world. So, yeah, that’s pretty good. Last week, we launched our latest products including the Blackmagic Studio Camera at 3am local time because we, for all intents and purposes, appear as an American company to the outside world. And that’s just fine for us. The company’s co-founder, Grant Petty, is now on the AFR Rich List and, as in the immortal words of Yazz, the only way is up (9 News did a profile on Grant and the company which you can view at the following hyperlink: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=564020007898227).


That’s it for now

Here are some more pictures of the various goings-on from the past few months. I sorely wished I didn’t have to write this as a Lockdown Missive but given how far we are behind on the vaccination side of things (and Scotty’s Damascene conversion to lockdowns being the best and only way to deal with Delta until herd immunity is reached), I fear this may not be the last.

Still, whenever I feel down, I just look at the Shitshow in Sydney™ (it’s like the Rumble in the Jungle, but much, much worse) and feel grateful for decisive leadership from every other state premier (and to prove I’m not being partisan, I include the Liberal-led states of SA and Tasmania in that) in putting public health first. For most people it's not even up for debate (except for people like the repugnant Queensland LNP senator Matt Canavan who used some pretty callow and lazy maths to claim the ‘cost’ of each life saved by the Sydney lockdown is too high) and we should feel somewhat fortunate to live in a country where this is the way.


Conclusion

Well, the end of another period of time. Hooray. Congratulations for doing that thing.

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