For as long as I can remember, whenever budget time rolls around, or whenever governments need to find some money to fund some unusual enterprise, the axe falls with monotonous reliability on three things: health, education and welfare.
My political memory stretches back about thirty years. Although I was nine at the time, I remember Whitlam's first election campaign. I particularly remember that song, It's Time. I'm sure that's why he actually won; he had the best song in the history of Federal politics. I mean, can you remember the Liberal party's song from the last election? I can't. It's Time sounded like something out of Jesus Christ Superstar or Hair. It made me want to vote for him. I thought it was nearly as good as some of the Master's Apprentices stuff.
Anyway, starting the clock from 1975, it seems to me that reliably, every year, out come The Razor Gang, and down go the health, welfare and education budgets. Liberal governments do it savagely, Labour governments do it caressingly, but basically those three areas get hit, year in, year out.
I admit I may have a selective memory in this regard, but no matter how hard I rack my brains, I can't remember a time when a government threw a lot of money at any of these things -- except I've got a vague memory the Tasmanian government in about 1989 might have given some money to the private schools, so St Virgil's could afford a new statue of God or something. But I have to trust my memory: these three areas get hacked -- and they've been hacked relentlessly for as long as I've been old enough to pay attention.
So I got to thinking... back in the 70's, can you imagine how much money must have been tied up in health, education and welfare? They must have been rolling in the stuff. What other interpretation is possible? If you can cut money from a school system for 27 years, and still actually have a school system, what must it have been like in the first place?
I've attempted to reconstruct an image of health, education and welfare in the early to mid 70's.
Education: The average public school student is woken by special government-appointed time-keepers, who then escort them out of their house, where they are collected in a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow and driven to school. In this school, the teacher-student ratio is 25 teachers to each student, plus a variety of ancillary staff who juggle coconuts, walk about on their hands, and various other things deemed educational by the Department of Wasting Money. Most of these staff are in fact PhDs from Caltech or Oxford. The school is centrally heated by a vast and inefficient furnace which will only burn money. Wads of $20 bills are continuously shovelled into it. They would have shovelled $50 or $100 bills into it, but these hadn't been invented yet.
School excursions are a favourite with students -- however, instead of putting dozens of children on a bus and driving off to some local attraction or facility, the object of interest is brought to the school. For instance, in 1974, an entire village of Laplanders was brought over to Geilston Bay High School. A huge machine had to be invented to keep 950 acres of ice from melting, and special counsellors were appointed to the reindeer for no apparent reason. Later the same year Rose Bay High School sent several students to The Moon, after a plan to pull it out of its orbit and bring it closer to the Earth was deemed unfeasible, because the only machine capable of doing this was being used at the same time by Sorell Primary School to drain the Pacific Ocean.
And of course who can forget the school dances, where bands like Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin would keep us entertained? In fact The Beatles got back together in 1975 specially to play the National Anthem at assembly one day at Lindisfarne North Primary School. Bear in mind, this was at a time when impoverished private schools like Friends or St Virgils had to make do with an 8-track tape of Sister Janet Mead singing The Lord's Prayer.
Health: Back in 1975, they would pay you to get sick. The base rate for someone with the flu was equivalent to the salary of the entire board of directors of BHP. The more tests, operations and consultations you had to have, the better off you were. For someone who was chronically ill, this would become such a financial embarrassment that they would need some elaborate money laundering scheme to dispose of it all.
Public hospitals were amazing, grandiose things. Some of them were bigger than Sadam Hussein's palaces. A few were bigger than Iraq. When you got better, they insisted on keeping you in hospital for weeks or months, feeding you crayfish and caviar, and checking the growth of your fingernails with a machine that used so much electricity that it was powered by a quantum singularity attended by a team of scientists from Geneva. Also, rather than waiting lists for elective surgery, government employees would come around to your house every morning to see if there was anything you wanted operated on.
Hospitals were so over-staffed that they could only fit a minute fraction of their workforce into the building at any one time, and generally surgeons and nurses and orderlies and janitors worked in two or three minute shifts, after which they would be sent home by Learjet. They would have lots of specialised staff. For instance, some doctors could only say pronouns, others could only say transitive verbs, and you would generally need about 12 or 13 of them to be able to say things like "Good news, Mrs Davies -- the boil we lanced on your right foot is considerably smaller this morning, and we think you might be right to go home by about 1995."
Welfare: Welfare was of course the biggest rort of all back in the Whitlam Era. I can remember when my dad was on the dole for a few weeks in 1973, the government sent around dozens of naked African women to fan him with palm fronds.
If you were lucky enough to be unemployed and sick at the same time, they would usually buy you an island near Vanuatu, name a suburb of Canberra after you, and present you with a card which entitled you to rob banks and perform illegal sex acts. There was none of this "work for the dole" stuff, either, and you didn't have to prove you were looking for work. I saw a dole form from the mid 70s, and there were a couple of spaces where you had to put down that you'd masturbated at least twice that fortnight, and that was about it.
The dole was worth a lot more back then, too -- especially if you were married and had kids. There was an unemployed family of seven living near us in 1974, and they made so much money that The Reserve Bank based its financial policy on their spending patterns, and they were invited to join Bildeberg and OPEC.
It's amazing to think back on those days, isn't it? Imagine all the money that's been saved over the years since then, though. I wonder where they're spending it now?
Tim Gadd, Jan 2003
This article was written for, and first appeared in the Pompous Git's blog, Jan 7, 2003 (sorry, but FortuneCities don't seem to want to allow me to include a link to an off-server site for some reason)
