Dear Perth Airport,

I have oft ragged on you before, but I must say, my recent trip through the international terminal was surprisingly decent. Since the not-so-great renovation of early ’09, the food sucks less, and the couches (couches!) and showers (showers!) are a nice touch.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re still lame. Copying Sydney’s oh-look-now-I’m-in-duty-free thing is annoying, the lack of facilities for connecting flights saddens me, and public transport, *ahem*.

But my expectations were pretty low, and they were exceeded! (… a little bit)

Sincerely,
a weary traveller.

Forgive me a way-overdue (and backdated) post, but I’m still one of the top Google results for this, so I figure I ought to post something.

Back in November, the Barnett government released a newly-tweaked plan for “the Link”, the development site next to Perth train station. From the scant detail available, the plan doesn’t suck, and is of course better than what’s there now. But it’s also meagre in foresight (what good’s more open space without stuff around it to draw pedestrians?), and it still has the unfortunate feature of the railway not being underground all the way (alas, the promised Federal funding doesn’t go that far).

Likewise, the new waterfront plan announced a fortnight later is quite reasonable, and probably more realistic than the Carpenter government proposal, but still so far-off in funding and timelines that I expect no end of change between now and the start of construction.

Continuing with the dog theme: this cute little sign is in a park in Boston that was created by the Big Dig (an über-expensive project to put the city centre’s main freeway underground).

Then I went to catch the bus back to my train station. At first I was entertained by staring out the window and listening in on the two Aussie tourists sitting opposite me who couldn’t quite figure out how to convert time zones. But then we stopped in North Beach, they got off, and a hipster girl came on and took their spot.

And then she motioned to her dog, which jumped up on the seat next to me.

I echo Alex’s thoughts — he was a great bloke who’ll be sorely missed, and he absolutely deserved more time. But with what time he had, he was a dedicated mentor to many, and I always valued his counsel; more management-ey types (for he was never really one of them) would’ve probably used platitudes like “change agent” and “thought leader”.

And he believed in technology’s power to be at once cool, and able to change the world. Even with something as small as the home page of Facebook.

Not that long ago, the G20 seemed like an irrelevant organisation, and Pittsburgh an equally unimportant city (though I know people who’d say it still is!). But even if last Friday’s announcement was made up of “unenforceable vague standards”, in the words of one US Senator, it’s remarkable because at least there are standards being drawn up. Merely five or ten years ago, it’d have been extraordinary to see twenty nations agree to even try to harmonise policy in this way. But thanks to its right-place-right-time luck in the last 12 months, the G20 has managed to earn some cred, and all eyes seem to be on it.

And thus, in comparison to things like the freak-show last week at the UN General Assembly, the G20′s future suddenly looks filled with promise.

Obama’s stated aim of showing how the country’s “rust belt” is being transformed worked to the extent that plenty of articles were published, and there seems to be a media consensus that something significant happened in Pittsburgh (a changing of the guard, as it were, between the G7/8 and the G20). These stories are all obviously a bit contrived — but I can’t help but feel that maybe they’re onto something.

Well, that’s not true — it’s not the President’s plan, it’s a plan devised by (some of) Congress. That’s one of several steps Obama’s people took to try to avoid a repeat of Clinton’s failure in 1993, but (as one talking-head I saw tonight said) maybe they’re trying too hard on that front. The Democrats (for this issue has become painfully partisan) have failed miserably at selling their plan to ordinary people who see themselves as having to pay for it, and not having Obama to do his draw-people-together thing certainly didn’t help. Trying to rush the bill was also ill-advised.

And so the far-right were handed the perfect opportunity to jump into the void and spread fear, misinformation, and more fear. Hence the (not even extreme) examples of Sarah Palin’s dodgy remarks, and the editorial in an (admittedly half-rate) business paper panning on Britain’s NHS by saying Stephen Hawking would be left to die were he treated publicly. Even without facts, this tactic is brilliant; who’s gonna worry about the plight of others when fearing for your own life?

If only the plan were easy enough to comprehend that people could make up their minds for themselves. Oh wait, the current draft is a complicated mess.

If reform actually happens, it ought to be the high point of Obama’s term in office. But right now, I’m not holding out hope.