Chapter 43 Another New Start

                                                   Chapter 43 Another New Start

By the end of 1982 everything was happening at once. My training was coming to an end, and Peter's starting date at the State Councl loomed. In early January some of the Ambulance men from our centre helped Pete and I pack our stuff. Pete backed the six ton hired moving van into the backyard and I watched in awe as our heavy home-made bookcase swayed on a rope on its way over the balcony railing. I worked all day packing and was too exhausted at the end of the day to face my scheduled nightshift. I rang work and took two sickies. There is no doubt in my mind I would have been sick if I had tried to work those two nights!

     In many ways I hated leaving the Sunshine Coast, especially the children’s school and all our activities, but if the man of the house is unhappy...ain’t nobody happy! Not only that, but Ashley had become addicted to pinball at the parlour just down the street, and drugs and bikers were moving into the area.

    Our close friends insisted on coming with us to help unpack at the other end. Peter drove. Derek sat in the passenger seat with his wife on his knee. Although the seats were meant to accommodate two people, I sat in the middle, with my  knees pressed hard against the gear stick. The children sat in the well at the back of the seat, gleeful to be in their own little cubby house. They nursed the budgie in its cage, and Snuffles, who sat gasping with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out all the way to Brisbane. Peter had no way of knowing if we were overloaded, and worried all the way to the weighbridge on the outskirts of Brisbane. When we got to it, I shrank to leprechaun size, and our excess passengers stayed quiet under threat of annihilation until we were past the inspectors.

      Peter’s work at the State Council offered some unexpected benefits. Peter had an official car to drive, which left our car free for me to use. He enjoyed the work there and got on well. One of the ladies from the office had a friend in the clothing business who gave her regular access to the warehouse. She liked Peter and wasn't happy until she found out my dress size.

    From then on Peter arrived home regularly with a selection of clothes over his arm. I had never been so well dressed in all my life. Peter insisted on buying them for me because he hated taking them back and disappointing the woman. I had a lovely selection of dresses, skirts, and tailored suits and enjoyed dressing up and going out. I was tall and rather slim.

     What is it they say? “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!”nuary of 1986.

    When we first returned to Brisbane we rented a small, wooden house in Ferny Hills, on the north-western side of Brisbane. We had decided to settle in Ferny Hills to be near Peter's mother at Oxford Park. The rented house was built on the side of a very steep hill with a little bridge to the front door. To put the car in the garage under the house, it was necessary to back down the hill, because if you drove in frontwards you would never get out. Thank Heaven I’d had experience of backing, because the needle reached ‘extremely difficult’ on the backing metre. As I approached the house in the car I drove as close as possible to the left-hand side of the road to pull up, (across the road from the house.)  If I was in the right position I could then back into our driveway which almost immediately dropped away steeply down the hill. Towards the bottom of the driveway, I turned the wheel sharply, backing into the garage under the house.

    One day I had both our mothers in the back of the car. It was the first time they’d visited us since we’d moved back, and for devilment I didn't warn them about the adventure of backing into the garage.  As the back of the car dropped over the steep hillside they found themselves tipped backwards and staring up at the sky. When we were safely in the garage and the engine was turned off, they looked at each other in shock, and I had had my fun!  After that they insisted on getting out before I drove down!

    The steep backyard of that house had been terraced with about three terraces, and one night poor Snuffy must have taken a leap off one of the terraces. Unfortunately, trees planted on the lower levels had been staked with sharp pointed metal stakes.

      “Ooohh, what are we going to do?” wailed the children, as our old cat lay helplessly on the ground with half of his abdominal contents exposed.

     “Well, he’s got a 50% chance of survival,” the vet informed us after his operation.

     True to form, Snuffles never looked back. Within a few weeks he was as good as new.

    In October of 1983, we moved into a house that was purchased between us and Peter's mother.  She sold her house in Oxford Park and came to live with us because she didn't want to live on her own anymore, and we were her only family. The combined finances allowed us to buy a three-bedroom high brick home with room underneath to build a flat. When it was built, Pete wallpapered it for her and she had security grills installed on all windows and the sliding glass doors. The flat had a lounge-kitchenette, and the bedroom had built-in wardrobes. She brought enough of her furniture from Oxford Park to furnish the flat and after carpeting the floors, she was very comfortable, often spending her time knitting and watching TV.

    One day Stephanie and her little friend from next door, appeared at the front door with pleading looks on their faces, and a kitten each in their arms.

     “Mummy, can I have this little kitten... pleeese?? The man said they’re going to be drowned in 20 min if somebody doesn’t take them!”  Heavy sigh. Thanks ‘man.’

      The cat had kittens. One kitten took up residence, (too pretty to give away.) Alma,  Pete’s mum, favoured the new addition, often sneaking little tidbits of food to her at the back door. It gave her companionship, and I often found the two of them sitting in the sun together just inside her back door.

    At the time we bought the house, eight months after moving to Brisbane, I was relieving two or three days a week for Child Health. Pete's mum liked to go shopping, catching the early workers’ train at 8:30 a.m. She window shopped for most of the day, ate lunch out, and then returned home with the workers again at five o'clock. She may have only purchased two balls of wool.

    Six months later I started evening classes at Kelvin Grove High School in senior English. I loved it, even though I was one of the oldest in class. Once again at exam time I was petrified, but to my great delight I achieved a six out of a possible seven score and topped the class. After that, I tried to do ancient history by correspondence. Alas, studying on my own was something I was not prepared for. I lasted until lesson two.

    After three years, Peter became deputy superintendent of Brisbane city.

     When a new progressive superintendent replaced the old retiring boss, Peter enjoyed his job more than ever. In those days the superintendent was answerable only to the Minister for health. People who'd been treated well by ambulance staff during their later years, often showed their appreciation by bequeathing sums of money to the ambulance for specific purposes, such as defibrillators (maybe if they had had a heart attack for instance,) or perhaps a new ambulance vehicle.

    One of Peter's main functions was to deal with staff, hiring and firing. He also dealt with patients’ complaints, and was nothing if not a diplomat. A real Dale Carnegie, when there was a complaint he drove out to the person’s home and interviewed them. As a general rule, before he left their home they would be eating out of his hand. But he never shrank from his responsibility if a staff member required disciplinary action either. I admired his capability.

      Because Queensland had a reputation for being a little out of touch, pilots on flights to Brisbane were frequently heard to announce to their passengers, “We’re now crossing the border into Queensland; please put your watches back an hour, and your lives back 20 years.” Queensland was the only state without daylight saving. Then we became infamous all over Australia as details of corruption surfaced during the Fitzgerald enquiry. Joe Bjelke Peterson, the Premier, spent many successful years as the leader, until that famous turmoil. Perhaps he stayed too long.

      Big changes came at the Queensland elections. The Labor Party won with a 24 seat majority. Wayne Goss was the new Premier and he felt that big changes were needed. (Everybody felt that big changes were needed.) Unfortunately, the Labour Party didn't have a solid plan for change, so they followed the pattern set by New South Wales, when their government changed. It was a pity that they also made most of the mistakes that were made in New South Wales as well. People were put into positions they knew nothing about and told to 'change things!' They were all given budgets to make these changes. When creating the new structure, criteria for the various positions to be applied for were compiled on the spot. I was working in child health at the time and both Peter and I were undergoing similar stresses because of all the changes caused by the restructuring process. I was working casual so it didn’t affect me as much, but I could see what others were suffering.

    Every government department in Queensland went through the same thing: teachers were going through enormous stress; ambulance officers became confused and depressed; I heard comments about similar experiences in the public curators office and in the education system. A man we knew worked in corrective services and came to church stressed about changes he couldn’t understand. It seemed that right across the board government departments were being restructured. (Unfortunately, often by amateurs). The thing to do when applying for a new job, (or the job you were doing at present which you may have been doing for years,) to satisfy the academics in charge, was to have pieces of paper showing a diploma at least, but preferably a degree of some kind. Everybody had to have a degree in something to work at something. When I went to school the lower achievers became shop assistants, nursing assistants, or similar, and did the jobs very well. Now, shop assistants needed a degree in retailing.

    When the labour government took office, the ambulance had millions of dollars in trust funds. In three months they were struggling to find a dollar. It had all disappeared. No doubt most of it went on the higher wages demanded to pay the new hierarchy. We were seeing the building of a huge bureaucracy. Not hard to build when you're hell bent on change, but almost impossible to dismantle in following years. After all, who wants to make a law to do themselves out of a job?

    Peter had started studying a business degree at the TAFE College, and bureaucracies were one of the things they studied.

    “It’s easy to create a bureaucracy,” he told me,”But it’ll take generations to untangle this mess, and many years before common sense is an asset to the job again.”

    Common sense was uncool; political correctness ruled supreme in every walk of life. Fortunately we all became more aware of  racism at this time, one of the better outcomes. It seems to be a worldwide trend; it isn't just Australia.

    In the child health department alone in the early 90s, $4 million was spent on employing a consultant to work out how money could be saved in the department! (It seemed that in some places lunacy ruled supreme!)

    It was widely acknowledged later that despite all Joh’s problems with corruption, he was a master of money management, and left an affluent state behind when he retired. Like many successful leaders he stayed too long, and in the staying, he obliterated the sight of his good management and replaced it with boredom, dishonestly and disappointment.

      Pete’s old boss had been appointed acting assistant commissioner and given power to make changes he was ill-prepared for. When he finally understood how much power he had he became a little heady.

     Staff everywhere were bewildered. University graduates with no experience in the field were making the decisions in many cases. When you did apply for your job, the selection criteria often bore little resemblance to the requirements of the job in hand. To pander to the university graduates’ ravenous greed for challenging rhetoric, it became necessary in a job application to supply reams of paper containing a maximum of new and trendy expressions, and multiple words and catchphrases that were unfamiliar to the workers doing the jobs.

    New words, and as many as you could fit in, impressed the selection panels and became part of our language. Words such as proactive, strategies and synergy, and countless phrases such as lateral thinking were dreamed up and influenced the selectors. Multiple committees were now deemed necessary to run departments. Managers reorganised priorities and staff  gathered together for role play, and needed frequent training sessions. Patients, now called ‘clients,’ played second fiddle while the staff did their ‘trainings’ on long weekends, often staying in plush palaces and luxury resorts; (all paid for by someone with a fat budget or a packet of money they needed to spend.) The modern educators felt everyone was so highly trained, they should be allowed self accountability.

    In the reshuffle, Peter applied and was successful in obtaining the superintendent’s old job, now called District Superintendent. He was in charge of Central Brisbane, which incorporated the City, and five northern suburbs.

    Unfortunately, being the Superintendent of Brisbane did not now hold the authority that it once did. The position was previously looked upon as the head of the ambulance, answerable only to the Minister. Now the suptintendent was at the bottom of a large hierarchy, which, level by level required a large amount of money just to be administered. Of course each level had its own budget (and naturally spent every cent of it in the fiscal year!) 

    Downward pressure to perform, and especially to SAVE money, created dangerously expanding pressure cookers. Above himself, Peter now had the Minister, the commissioner, two deputy commissioners, and the assistant commissioner in his region. Altogether around Queensland there were five assistant commissioners appointed to the five newly formed regions. All these positions were highly paid and it wasn't long before 'head of department' budgets were eating up available monies. Bureaucracies are an expensive commodity. I could see Peter was feeling the tension as his stress levels soared. He arrived home looking anxious, frowning unconsciously. The new Deputy Commissioner accused him of sitting back and letting the world go by, and of not putting his heart into the work. (He was probably right there!)

    In an effort to save money in the nursing world and to support another newly created hierarchy, nurses were cut from the bedside. It was the same in the ambulance, and men were cut from the roadside. So in the end it was the patients who suffered and the staff taking care of them became more stressed as there were fewer of them. Old priorities were tumbling fast.

    The newly appointed Ambulance Commissioner, who brought with him his fancy qualifications, was heard to say one night at a function, "The trouble with Queensland ambulance officers is, they worry too much about their patients." I rest my case!

    In his efforts to save money, Peter discontinued the supply of milk to the men for their tea and coffee in the kitchen. It sounds pathetic, but it is an indication of how desperate he was to find some way of saving money for them.