‘Where’s the Australian spirit? We’ve lost our sense of charity at Christmas’

A couple of weeks ago I was being interviewed by one of the local radio stations about the community newsletter we circulate in our district, when I heard a word I have never heard used before in an everyday context. Kleptocracy. Sure, I’ve known of the word for as long as I can remember and if asked to describe its meaning, I guess I’d say something about a government of thieves. As in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, maybe. Or something equally exotic like that.

But this was different. My interviewer was a local identity and he probed away at why a small group of us would beaver away, week-in, week-out to produce and distribute a small publication that will never make money in a month of Sundays.

Bravely (I thought), I explained that we were filling a serious gap in our local community fabric by stepping up when our established newspaper of over a century’s standing, ceased to produce a hard-copy version. But then I added that our strongest wish was to provide an ear, a platform, an outlet, a soapbox, so that those who never get heard can have a voice of their own. Unlike the “usual suspects” who appear in local papers on every second page.

He must have had more than an interviewer’s casual interest in what I was explaining because when we broke halfway through for a light musical interlude, he lowered the professional mask and unburdened himself. Jawed tightened, rather angrily I thought, he told me how he now regarded “the government” as a kleptocracy.

This was quite a surprise, because my interviewer is known to be a member of one of the political parties that comprise the Coalition governments that rule in both Sydney and Canberra. But that’s his problem which I didn’t feel it was then appropriate to press. Nevertheless, his was a statement, both bold and bald, that you could hardly ignore and so it has stayed with me since, even driving me to my Macquarie Dictionary.

“Kleptocracy”, I read, “a governing group who steal from the population as a whole to increase their own wealth or power.” Phew!

As it happens, I have no knowledge of or interest in ascertaining how kleptocratic any of our governments are. I am more interested in the lives of those who are barely hanging on in a pretty difficult period of time. So, when NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian deflected the pork-barrelling of $250 million in grants on the basis that “everyone does it”, I murmured to no-one in particular, “whatever happened to standards.”

Which rather segued into the next item in the news bulletin I was watching, where retiree after retiree was tearfully describing how they’d been ripped off by some shonk, losing their homes and entire life savings in some cases, while the official government regulator of the financial sector appeared to be passively sitting on its hands.

And then I thought of my own parents and the culture in which they came to self-awareness. They were the quintessential “forgotten people” extolled by the late Robert Gordon Menzies during World War II. That is, the quiet householders who were devoted to the idea of family and putting down roots. That they had not one charitable bone between the two of them would have been no cause for embarrassment, because their watch-word was always “self-reliance”.

They hated government welfare spending and they refused to take the Age Pension until destitution drove them to it. But, and this is a very important but … they always paid their bills on time, they didn’t fiddle their taxes and they didn’t steal. It was a point of honour for them. And they believed that such a personal code should be extended into the community as a whole by the strict adherence to known and accepted standards. As Bob Menzies always implied.

As I sat there, uncomfortably watching a man at least as old as myself, sobbing into the television cameras as he told his wretched story, I found myself wondering, what would Dad make of that. The man on the screen was as obviously one of the forgotten people as himself, a man who had obeyed the rules but was utterly destroyed by some scoundrel while no one in officialdom was rushing to do anything about it. I wonder whether Dad would have asked: Have our ethics slipped that far?

In a little over a week, Christmas Day will be upon us and one of the stories we reported in our latest community newsletter was how the free public lunch provided by one of our local churches has been cancelled for the first time in over 30 years. This was a big event – two years ago, more than 400 attended, and this in a town of only 25,000 people.

But the problem is not that there is no longer such a heavy demand for the lunch, but that the facilities needed to provide such a banquet are too limited, not for the hundreds seeking a true Christmas experience, but for the scores of volunteers needed to function at a Covid-safe distance from each other in preparing, cooking, serving and cleaning up.

Those 400 attendees are not all the hard-up and the indigent, now to be deprived of a filling lunch at the most socially-sensitive time of the year. The lunch, as I said, is free and there is no means test on attendance, so a significant cohort among those who came in the past have been the simply lonely, regardless of wealth or income.

In most country towns there are many, often hundreds, of elderly folk, often widows and widowers, without families or whose families are scattered to the four corners of the earth. Christmas Day lunch, where they were collected by volunteers’ cars, treated like royalty for a day and then sent home with some token of a lovely occasion where they felt like they were somebody again, was special. Now gone, through nobody’s fault.

Yet those same folks, right across this country, will still be there, isolated from human company on the most important human day of the year. I’m sure if we looked around, even in our own streets, we’d see them, and maybe we might move beyond my parents’ generation’s mantra of “charity begins at home”, and ask instead, “but where does it end”?

If Aussies could take in to their lunch tables the visiting sailors on British or American warships stuck in one of our ports on Christmas Day, as happened often at the height of the Cold War, why can’t they do the same for the lonely old lady around the corner whose kids are stuck in Beirut or Brisbane or Bristol or Bangladesh. It’s still pretty cold out there for her.