They were talking about walking the dog down their street, smiling at other people, and receiving back nothing but blank stares.

You know, I don’t think people are rude. As a taxidriver, I meet a LOT of people (one of the reasons someone who doesn’t know me well suggesting that I should “get out more” totally made my day), and most are friendly and polite.

So long as I am. I greet people with a smile and a “Good Morning”, “Good Evening”, “Good Heavens” as appropriate, make eye contact and take note of their needs. Someone elderly with a walking stick, for example, and I jump out of my seat to help them in, make sure they have enough legroom, close the door, etc. Younger folk, more spry of body if not mind, get Michael Jackson on the CD and they sing along.

I think it’s a matter of everyday life being superficial. Larry McMurtry noted in his book Roads : Driving America’s Great Highways that you can drive across the nation and speak not a surplus word to another soul, with self-serve petrol pumps and fast food restaurants. “Big Mac, medium fries and a bucket of root beer” does not make for a meaningful interaction, even if you add “please” at the end and the teenager instructs you to have a nice day as she hands over the rootbeer.

When we lived in smaller communities and knew everybody’s business, we could be closer to their hearts, if I may put it that way. Nowadays, the bus driver is someone on a random shift from the other side of a great city, the cabbie comes from a different continent, the news is broadcast by an anchorman instead of a town crier, and gossip is reserved for Facebook rather than a good old natter over the back fence with the minister’s wife.

Gone are the days when you sat on your front porch and waved to your neighbours as they walked by. One town council, seeking a return to friendly neighbourhoods, decreed that every new dwelling should have a porch. And so it was- the porches were built and secured with metal grilles to keep out intruders and the world.

I don’t have any easy answers. Smile at strangers and you could attract stalkers. Move to a small town and be unemployed?

Perhaps my best advice is something I follow myself. Imagine that, following your own advice!

Become a cabbie.

Trust me on this, you’ll get to know a lot of people, you’ll be a small but essential part of the community, and the pensioners will love you as you lug their groceries up the steps.

And at night, as you put on the soft music for the couple embracing in the back seat, you can sigh happily for the spirit of romance.

Cabbies might not have all the answers, but they know a lot more than they generally let on.

Three young friends got into my cab for a ride into town from one of the Defence bases here. One was full of pride in her job – a cabin attendant on the RAAF VIP transport. She talked to her two friends about how the Prime Minister smiled and greeted her by name, was kind and considerate to her and all the other staff. She might not agree with all his policies, she said, but he was a nice man.

She had no kind words for another senior Government minister. He was only interested in calling for the most expensive bottles of wine aboard, and downing a couple on the relatively short flight to and from Melbourne. He called the cabin crew, “Hey, you!”, but he knew the onboard wine cellar by name and pedigree.

Tonight

He was wasted. This time on a Saturday morning, the only people over twenty-five in Civic are a few cabbies like me. This bloke was mid-thirties, business suit, tie loose, shambling along the footpath. A mid to senior-level public service manager, by his look.

My cab was next up and he opened the door, falling into the seat beside me. I examined him carefully. He was wrecked, to be sure, and he could be trouble. Trouble like throwing up, falling asleep, talking endless rubbish.

I drove off the rank, but stopped a few car lengths along to get the destination. He named a suburb five minutes away, and when I pressed him further, offered up the street name. This was hard work. He didn’t want to stay conscious. He wanted me to drive him home, and he didn’t care that I didn’t know where he lived.

Two months ago

Two middle-aged women got into the cab. They chatted to themselves in the back seat, and I cocked half an ear at their conversation, in case it included directions to the driver.

One was describing a young female relative, a cabin attendant on the RAAF VIP transport. She was upset and unhappy with her job. The Prime Minister was an arsehole, treating the staff like shit, demanding impossible things of them, swearing at them. The young cabin attendant had put in for a transfer. I wondered if this was the same happy young woman who had been in my cab before the election, when the government changed.

I wondered if she was the same one who had made national headlines a year ago when she had burst into tears when abused by the Prime Minister, causing an official incident report to be filed by the plane’s captain.

Yesterday

“There’s no point sugar-coating this,” the Prime Minister said, admitting that he had demoted a a junior minister for bungling an important program. A program that had cost four young lives, had been scrapped halfway through and had caused huge and unexpected unemployment.

Sugar-coating is what the Prime Minister does. He does it so well. To listen to him, his government is sweet, in control, moving forward, doing important stuff.

The problem is that it isn’t true. The government is under the Prime Minister’s tight control. The Foreign Minister has nothing to do, because the ex-diplomat Prime Minister handles all foreign affairs, making overseas trips on a weekly basis. Every government program is scrutinised at the top. Anything that could embarrass the government is sent back until the media release is phrased just so.

And that’s about it. The government has done nothing much except issue press releases. The Prime Minister has made a few important but symbolic speeches and failed to back them up with action.

Well, no, that’s not strictly true. The government reacted decisively to the global financial crisis by spending the surplus painstakingly saved by the previous administration. Money was handed out to people, impressive programs were dreamed up to make work, including the bungled roof insulation scheme with the four deaths, the surprise scrapping, the sudden unemployment, the ministerial demotion etc.

The previous government’s border protection scheme was abolished, with the predictable result that illegal immigrants boarded leaky old fishing boats for the dangerous crossing to Australia. A new boat crammed with desperate people is reported every week. Some of them don’t make it. Some of them take extreme measures to be “rescued” by the Navy, dying, drowning, burning in their desire to enter Australia.

Tonight

My passenger’s head was nodding. He was asleep. Or something like it. I cranked up the airconditioning and took the corners sharply. Usually this wakes up the dozers, but this chap was sinking fast, burnt out.

We reached his street and with a few jabs on the brakes, he was awake. Or something like it. “This is your street,” I said. “What number are we looking for?”

We cruised up to the end of the street, made a u-turn and stopped.

“Where are we?” he asked.

I gave him the street name and the suburb, double-checking against my GPS.

“This isn’t the right place,” he complained.

He looked at the meter, fumbling with notes to pay the fare. Hell, but I couldn’t let him out unless I was sure he was in the right place. Letting a dozey drunk out on an unfamiliar street long after midnight is a recipe for disaster.

“What number are we looking for?”

He pulled out more money.

“Where do you live? What number is your house?”

This was stupid. I was talking to a public service executive as if he were a five year-old.

“Do you have your address on a drivers licence or something?”

Finally he gave me the house number. It didn’t sound plausible, but we moved along the street, the sidelight picking out house numbers.

“It’s the other side!” he announced. “Turn around!”

We turned around and he directed me into a driveway. Well, the driveway next to the one he lived in, and we had to bump over a bit of grass to get there. He paid the fare, and got out, wobbly on his feet.

“Careful getting out,” I warned him. “Take your time.” As if he was a pensioner, creaky and slow, afraid of falling and breaking a fragile bone.

Drunks have fallen out of the cab before. They can’t stand, they flop out, their legs give way. It’s a worry, and I watch them carefully.

He made it out, staggering up the driveway while I kept the headlights shining for his progress.

That was enough for me. My night was at an end.

Tomorrow

This Prime Minister has wasted a splendid opportunity. For the first time ever, the Commonwealth and all State and Territory governments were under the control of one political party. Constitutional reform, an end to the costly divisions in health and education, new federal co-operation; the golden dream of every government was there for the taking.

And what happened? Nothing. The new Prime Minister made a few speeches, set his public servants working insane hours preparing reports on schemes that would never happen, dismantled some of the programs of the previous government and engaged in the mother of all public relations campaigns, working towards 100% favourable press coverage.

The government’s own list of achievements sounds wonderful, until investigation reveals that they are mostly announcements of schemes. Has the National Broadband Network been achieved? No. The first implementation in a tiny test market is months away.

The clean energy schemes are stalled or scrapped. The immigration policy is a disaster. The response to climate change failed before Copenhagen began. Election pledges on hospitals are broken. An education reporting scheme has had the predictable result of students deserting the schools ranked lowest, starving those schools of enrolment-based resources needed for improvement.

The government has lost control. All the public service research reports in the world, all the glowing media releases, all the fancy speeches cannot hide the fact that things are slipping away. The State and Territory governments are falling steadily, the chance for reform vanishing.

The media, sweet-talked to distraction, is sniffing blood in the water. Hard questions are being asked of waffling ministers. The Rudd gloss is fraying.

My take is that a man who cannot treat the staff with dignity and respect, venting his frustration on those who cannot fight back, smiling in public and snarling in public, sugar-coating disaster after disaster, squandering golden opportunities and promising heaven to come, my take is that such a man is not fit to run the nation, because he will inevitably lose the confidence of the people.

Not that I think the other party is any better. I don’t. The one thing I like about the Opposition Leader is that he’s honest.

Goodnight!

I’m disgusted. I’m a night cabbie, and for the past year or two, ever since the last Commonwealth election, I’ve been driving home public servants, drunk and exhausted. I pick them up from Parliament, from government offices, from hotels. Long after midnight.

Whatever they’ve been working on, it’s not working.

But there’s always time to crank the seat back, reach down for a book, and read a few pages before the next passenger shows up.

Lately the reading material has been a book on changing lives. An inspirational book talking of the beneficial impact of very small loans to the world’s poorest people. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, was once a professor of economics, who looked out of his office window to a small village and wondered how the theories he was teaching related to the residents.

On investigation, he found that the poorest people in the village were very poor indeed, held back by poor access to money offered at usurious interest rates. A woman would work all day weaving intricate crafts for a profit of a few cents, which she spent on feeding her children. If she could gain just a small amount of money to escape the money-lenders who were also her raw material suppliers and the tied buyers of her work, she could prosper and profit.

From a small seed loan came a great organisation, breaking free of money-lenders, private banks and government corruption and ineptitude. Aimed at small loans to the very poorest, Grameen Bank prospered, spinning off programs and organisations across the globe.

His book, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, has been my taxicab reading material for the past week.

He struck a chord with me. For too long the great charity organisations have thrived in the developed nations, growing platoons of well-paid executives in modern office towers who plan advertising campaigns for donation drives staffed by unpaid volunteers. The spokesmen for these groups are always immaculately dressed in business suits or tailored adventure kit, posing before the cameras, asking for yet more money. The donations with which they are entrusted are diluted by administration costs and advertising. Delivery is facilitated by payments to government officials. Consultants jet in, stay in business hotels, hire cars and dine in the best restaurants.

I’ve had the opportunity to study one of the more visible charity saints, and I have rarely seen a more horrid, selfish, bigoted and intolerant bastard in my life. Before the cameras he is sympathetic smiles. In private he is ruthless, vicious in eliminating competition and fiercely protective of his public image. Every inch the manipulative politician.

He gets the funds in, sure, but how much good does he do to those who need it most? I wonder.

In contrast, Grameen Bank executives are to be found riding bicycles to remote villages, sleeping on rush mats, sharing bowls of rice and vegetables with their clients, dodging attacks verbal and physical from the established political, financial, social and religious groups who depend on the status quo for their standing.

In particular, Grameen Bank helps women. In the poorest nations, women often carry the greatest load and have the lowest status. A mother will cut her own food short so that her children may grow and when food is very short indeed she will starve, but before that point she suffers the agony of being unable to breastfeed her baby.

Now, I’m not willing to cut back my own comfortable lifestyle too much. I could sell everything I owned, give it to the very poorest, and never make a dent in global poverty.

But I can help. My passengers sometimes give me tips. The businessmen and the government officials so rarely tip that it is a cause for wonder when they do. But those who pay the fare from their own pocket, those who are least able to afford a generous gesture, they are my best tippers.

From now on my tip money goes into microfinance loans. Not a huge strain on the resources, but a gesture that helps others, and makes me happy in the knowledge.

Kiva.org is one of those internet creations that enables people like me to lend money to those in need, with very little administrative costs, no huge organisation, no Business Class Saints. I can choose where my money is to go, and I can see how it is spent, right down to the individual receiving the loan.

Typically loans are small, for a few hundred dollars, repaid over a year or two, and aimed at gaining resources that can be turned to profit. A sewing machine, a second-hand fridge, a new engine for a taxi. Each loan is financed by multiple lenders giving twenty-five dollars each. Loans are often approved and disbursed, and then “backfilled” using the internet money. The borrower commences repayments immediately. Small regular repayments until the total is repaid. And when the money comes back home, it can be re-lent, gifted to Kiva, or withdrawn.

A brother cabbie

Lives are enriched. The world gets ever so slightly better off.

I’m starting small. I’m helping out a cabbie in Azerbaijan. My Kiva lender page is here. I’m feeling very warm and happy and positive about this.

And, for a night cabbie who has occasionally been roused from honest sleep by a collector for one of the glossy charities, and been mistaken by that collector for a snarling attack dog, this is good news indeed!

–Skyring

Bonus video: PBS story on Kiva

The idea is that, knowing there’s a savage penalty in store, drivers will fall into line, obey the road regulations in every respect, and the problem vanishes.

As ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope said, announcing tougher laws, “We are sending a clear message to the community that Canberra’s culture of dangerous driving will not be tolerated.”

Government is out of touch. The accidents have been fatal. The crime of being stupid on the roads is one that is punishable by death. Drivers know this, so what possible notice are they going to take of any lesser penalty? A hefty fine for going around a corner too fast and sliding into a tree is nothing when you compare it to having a branch speared through your trunk.

Sending messages to the community and paying for advertising campaigns doesn’t work. Jon Stanhope could be sitting beside some of the morons on the road, reading out the regulations, and they are still going to slug down a six-pack and whip out on wet roads for a pack of fags.

When self-policing obviously isn’t working, you need to get real actual burly police out there on the roads doing the policing.

The point for the government is that police are expensive and fatal car crashes are free. Apart from replacing the odd light pole it’s a user pays situation.

Well, Chief Minister Stanhope, I’m about fed up with some of these public artworks you’ve been scattering round interchanges and motorways. A pile of painted rocks and twisted metal girders may be art in your book, and well worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars to the “artist”, but it’s another useless roadside obstacle for drivers to run into if they lose control on a wet road, and it’s the cost of a car full of policemen patrolling the streets to catch the lunatics driving dangerously.

And there are lunatics out there. I’m a cabbie. I see them every day and night. They don’t care about the death penalty, and they aren’t going to care if you ratchet the dangerous driving fine up to a million bucks. It’s not going to happen to them so why should they worry?

Well, make it happen. Get a couple of coppers in an unmarked car appearing out of nowhere when they least expect it. That’ll send a message.