HERE at the Centre for Research into Annoying and Petty Political Economic Decisions (CRAPPED) we try to remain calm, reasonable, on point and focused.
We’ve been tested over the years, of course.
We’re off bacon, ham and devils on horseback for life because of the number of pork-barrelling projects we’ve had to run our red pens through. Roads to nowhere. White elephant industry skills centres and economic development zones. Inflated government contracts for dodgy projects in marginal seats.
Then there’s the millions spent on scoping studies and consultants’ reports for rail lines and freeways that are never going to be built, but which provide a handy excuse for pollies to put off actual decisions to forever and beyond.
Not to forget the pollie travel rorts that are defended because they’re “within the rules”, the $500,000 ministerial office refurbishments or the suburban MPs who try to justify $150,000 “office admin costs”.
All trying of CRAPPED’s patience and reserves of civility, all adding to the sense that three primary school-aged children with a dart board and a seeing-eye dog would make better economic decisions than some political leaders.
It's all adding to the sense that three primary school-aged children with a dart board and a seeing-eye dog would make better economic decisions than some political leaders.
But then, last week, our patience was at an end. Our dudgeon was higher than Bronwyn Bishop’s during Choppergate. Our nostrils were flared. Our ears were steaming.
The NSW Government made a move on public libraries.
In a long history of Australian state governments slashing public library funding to pay for “essentials” like pollie pay rises, the NSW Government announced an 18 per cent cut in library funds in its Budget. The nerve of them.
So here’s the class war argument against it.
Although the world’s first libraries were in places like ancient Mesopotamia in modern-day southern Iraq more than 4000 years ago, and ancient China, Egypt and Greece, it wasn’t until the early 1800s in Britain that the idea of free public libraries funded by government took hold.
We have alcohol to thank for it.
Enlightenment reforms meant the oppressed masses weren’t working 20-hour days anymore and Britain’s leaders worried that the oppressed were filling their idle hours with drink and debauchery, something like Australians over the Christmas holidays today, minus the sunblock.
By 1835 a government committee examined “the extent, causes, and consequences of the prevailing vice of intoxication among the labouring classes of the United Kingdom” and proposed a solution – the “establishment of parish libraries and district reading rooms” which “might draw off a number of those who now frequent public houses”.
The Public Libraries Act was passed in 1850, although not without worries from some landed gentry that the newly-abstemious would also become rebellious.
There were fears that working class free public library “lecture halls” would “give rise to an unhealthy agitation” among the masses, but the masses generally managed to sit quietly and read A Christmas Carol, Jane Eyre, The Communist Manifesto and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall without overthrowing the British Government.
It was enlightened Victoria that first saw the value of a free public library only a short time after the Brits took the plunge. By 1854 the Melbourne Public Library was up and running as one of the first free public libraries in the world, now known as the State Library Victoria.
It took NSW until 1869 to open the first free public library on the site of the State Library in Macquarie Street near NSW Parliament.
There’s a table in one corner of the library closest to CRAPPED’s headquarters, with a view overlooking a large park. It is a prime spot on a winter’s day where the morning sun softens the chill.
On Wednesday two women sat at the table, completed forms, spoke and laughed softly together and shared a hot drink from a flask. On a table nearby two elderly men read newspapers until a third sat with them and asked for advice about using his phone. They clearly didn’t know each other, but settled into an easy discussion about phones, technology in general and how their grandchildren were computer geniuses. Eventually the fellow with the phone problem went to a librarian and asked for help. She was able to oblige.
CRAPPED counted about 30 people in the library – students studying together and separately, single people wandering around, young children with parents and grandparents and a group sitting in a meeting room.
CRAPPED has been in libraries when people with disabilities, agitated and distressed people have sought help from librarians, and I’ve watched that help being freely given.
Librarians have helped people negotiate government websites, print off forms, complete forms, find information and deal with problems. CRAPPED knows a retired librarian who dropped everything one day when people came running into the library to say a person had had a heart attack in the toilet downstairs.
She resuscitated the person and dealt calmly with events that followed. All in a day’s work, apparently.
Libraries are the places in society where money doesn’t buy you a better level of service, or a VIP entry, or a privileged seat at the table. The currency of libraries is knowledge, and respect for the idea that knowledge should be freely shared and available because society is the better for it.
Across Australia there are hundreds of public libraries – 368 in NSW alone, and mobile libraries for isolated and remote communities. We might have smart phones, internet access and a national broadband network, but library usage in many places is growing because it’s a shared public good.