The Melbourne Cup: A fantasy land for the rich and poor alike

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This was published 6 years ago

The Melbourne Cup: A fantasy land for the rich and poor alike

Updated

The fun and frolics of the Melbourne Cup provide a relatively rare opportunity to glimpse the uber rich, the rich, the corporates, the not-so-rich and, of course the "punters" at play. The tax dodgers, the family trustees and, whisper it, even a few dinky-di crooks, can all mix and mingle. After all, aren't they just like the rest of us? For just one day, the old money, the new money and the no money can kick up their heels around the horses, the fashion and the fantasy that we all live in a classless Australia.

Stewart Sweeney, North Adelaide, SA

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

Lucky to be Lloyd

Ho hum, "Lord Lloyd of the Lodge" has won first prize in the raffle, the Melbourne Cup. No surprises there, considering he purchased so many of the available tickets. Many of the hapless and hopelessly devoted patrons of his cash-cow, the crass monument to glitz and greed, adorning Melbourne's riverside, can take solace in the knowledge, that they have helped to fund in no small way, the bulging trophy cabinet, prominent within the confines of the extravagant and opulent "Lord Lloyd's Lodge" up Macedon way.

Christopher Holdstock, Glenroy

The sport of kings, with whips in hand

The Melbourne Cup is over and thousands of people watched the national event with varying degrees of enthusiasm. My reaction was tempered by the Laura Weyman-Jones article ("One of the cruellest days on Australia's calendar", Comment, 7/11), which deemed Cup Day as one of cruelty. Horses have served humans for thousands of years, but subjecting them to great distress for monetary gain seems immoral. Owners, trainers and jockeys often suggest that their horses rose to the task or enjoyed the challenge, as the sweating animals come off the track. I would ask them, how do they know that when the horse has no choice but to race with a rider wielding a whip. In the "sport of kings" the kings are always in charge, but not always compassionate.

Leo Gamble, Mentone

Face the sinister reality

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The first seven pages of the paper devoted to Cup Day were in stark contrast to the article by Laura Weyman-Jones that morning. At night on TV was the regional centre which raced baby crocs, cane toads, frogs and crabs. It was often said Australians would bet on two flies crawling up the window. At least half the takings were to be donated to charity. It was announced, so I heard, that an injured horse was to be "taken to hospital". How often can a horse be rehabilitated? Something sinister has to be happening when a horse is covered by a screen. Can the public not accept the reality ("Cup Day runner dies", 8/11)?

Beverley McIntyre, Camberwell

Where there's real love and care

Horse racing, like any form of entertainment, underpinned by large profits will engender abuse and in this case cruelty (Letters, 8/11). It can occur in large stables where they are simply numbers and money machines. Horses actually love to run, are loved and cared for dearly by trainers and owners alike. You cannot mistake the love of their mount even by seasoned jockeys, win or no win.

Frances Damon, Tooradin

Winning a heart

Amid the self-congratulation and back-slapping of the big winners on Cup Day, we should acknowledge the achievements of Kathy O'Hara. She may only have come 17th, but her plucky run on her beloved mare Single Gaze certainly stole my heart, and who knows what her future may be?

Helen Scheller, Benalla

THE FORUM

Two-faced on tax

The picture emerging from the massive disclosures of the hidden underbelly of international tax avoidance is that the one of the biggestagencies responsible is the United Kingdom, which is like the two-faced Roman god Janus. One face is turned towards the low-level taxpayer who must hand over his taxes studiously without any perception of avoidance, and the second to tax havens such as the Isle of Man, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda, where shady corporate structures are facilitated to hide or obfuscate beneficial ownership, avoiding tax responsibilities in civil society all over the world.

However, in this "mare's nest" of avoidance structures, one should also include the governments of Luxembourg, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and of course the US. It is the tax laws of the US which allow hundreds of billions of unrepatriated profits to be in held offshore tax havens aided by governments in the countries mentioned. These countries who claim to be operating a civil society apply effective tax obligations only to the small taxpayer while the rich and well organised pay little or no tax.

It is no surprise criminals and terrorists exploit the same loopholes to conceal their funds transfers, and the whole disgusting mess is facilitated by a small army of well-heeled lawyers, tax advisers and accountants who for "30 pieces of silver" betray any possible adherence to responsible ethical behaviour. Civil society indeed.

Greg Angelo, Balwyn North

Ailing infrastructure

Doctors are certainly cognisant that the burden of disease has shifted from acute to chronic conditions, and the medical community welcomes policy that facilitates holistic management of complex chronic illness.

But I must respectfully disagree with Ross Gittins' sentiment that the healthcare system has been graced by the digital age ("Moving to better health", Comment, 8/11). We still communicate in faxes and pager systems. Some hospitals, including a tertiary referral centre for Victoria, still operates on paper-based documentation after funding requests for an Electronic Medical Record were unsupported by governments.

The Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record is promising in principle, but in practice the uptake has been low as the system is riddled with complex legal requirements which discourage uptake by medical practices and lacks integration with existing medical record systems.
This results in significant duplication and wasted doctor time – more administrative duties means fewer patients being seen. Outdated hardware and internet unreliability only make this more challenging.

Effective, efficient and reliable communication is critical in healthcare. If we are serious about chronic disease management and multidisciplinary care, we need the digital infrastructure to support it.

Dr Katarina Arandjelovic, Cardigan

Drug testing can work

Drug testing of welfare recipients holds merit if underpinned by compulsory enrolment in non-judgmental public health and social support programs ("Testing welfare recipients for drugs is wrong-headed", Comment, 8/11).
Supervised drug substitution with methadone and naltrexone by addiction physicians are designed to achieve and maintain long-term abstinence. Supportive counselling with slow weaning of drug substitutes reduce life-threatening risks of severe withdrawal from abrupt cessation of drugs for a dependant welfare recipient.

Ensuring such recipients are registered to for ongoing treatment could be critical to getting their life back on track, potentially reducing the vicious cycle entrenched welfare dependency. Participation in abstinence programs reduces the compulsion to exchange addiction to illegal drugs for more socially acceptable alcohol and nicotine.

Welfare recipients directed to comprehensive drug treatment programs are unlikely to commit crimes to make up the shortfall from social security curtailment that once fuelled their drug habit. In that context, drug tests for welfare benefits cannot be accused of being social engineering under the eyes of Big Brother.

Dr Joseph Ting, Carina

A great contributor

Yes, Mary Elizabeth Calwell (Letters, 8/11), your father, Arthur Calwell, was a fair administrator of immigration in the 1940s. He was also part of the great, positive transformation of this nation. Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, then World War, government and opposition united to build manufacturing, coupling it with increasing population.

The Immigration Department was brilliant. As factories grew, just not quite enough migrants arrived. Everywhere, factories had signs "Vacancies" . That gave bargaining power to workers, becoming among the highest paid ordinary workers in the world. Which made them shoppers and home-owners, with a mortgage of course. That was really something for migrants.

Menzies couldn't improve it. Neither could those who followed, Labor and Liberal. But they changed it. Now we have a trillion dollars' foreign debt from buying non-wealth producing consumer goods; about a million unemployed if you believe statistics and another million underemployed. That's progress and the reason historians prefer reinterpretation of the work of people such as your father.

Don Hampshire, Sunbury

Stop the parochialism

Mark Handby documents the trauma of more than half a million Rohingya Muslim refugees squashed into a tiny strip of land in Bangladesh ("Living here is almost unimaginable", Comment, 8/11).

Beyond the immediate practical help, he rightly calls for nations such as Australia to stop appeasing the Myanmar regime and acknowledge that a state-sponsored genocidal policy has caused this tragedy. Disturbing historic parallels are evident: the forced evictions of a people, now rendered stateless, into ghettoised settings by a regime intent on racial "purity"; the host nation's refusal to guarantee them long-term security, beyond Bangladesh's removal of some of them to flood-prone islands in the Bay of Bengal; and the indifference of the outside world to their plight.

The same pattern experienced by Armenians and Jews in the 20th century. The Rohingya tragedy calls for privileged nations such as Australia to abandon self-serving parochialism and act like humane international citizens.


Jon McMillan, Mount Eliza

Inhumane on all levels

Nearly everything in Bruce Stillman's letter ( 8/10) is meretricious at best. Dispassionate analysis of the situation on Manus Island is inhumane itself. A humanitarian emotional response is exactly the correct moral stance.

That the current immigration policy is somehow not ideological, is simply false. It the ideology of the self-serving, greedy and fearful with distorted humanity that drives it.

If supporters of the current regime are not racists or redneck bigots, they are appallingly constricted in their humanity.

As for the venality of migration agents and people smugglers, any failure to see the need to help asylum seekers is itself comparable to failing to stop and assist someone you've accidentally knocked over and injured, whether or not they contributed to the accident or not.
It's reprehensible not to help, and utterly appalling to further hurt.

Benjamin Nisenbaum, Mount Dandenong

Giving false hope

Political activists and lawyers are still falsely feeding those left on Manus Island with false hopes that they will still come to Australia if they raise enough furore and do enough damage to themselves and property, and starve themselves to get sympathy from the unsuspecting Australian public. A significant number of these people are actually not politically displaced. The shame of this whole sordid situation should rest on the shoulders of these lawyers and activists.

The government needs to keep its nerve and fastidiously work through this situation and get the Manus Island people into local accommodation or repatriated back to their own country.

Dale Wise, Ashwood

Too close for comfort

The Transport Accident Commission is advertising that cars travelling up to 60 km/h can pass bicycles at a distance of at least one metre. One metre is the distance between one's nose and finger tip while 60 km/h is over 16 metres a second. This is ludicrous as more than one metre is required if a bike skids and lands on its side. Are they creating death and injuries or preventing them?

Malcolm Cameron, Camberwell

Brake mistakes

My Fairlane had a big, broad brake pedal. Replaced it with a Calais, which uses a standard (manual) brake pedal. Other automatics are the same. It's so easy to stab at the brake pedal in emergencies, miss by a fraction, and come down hard on the accelerator, resulting in some very dangerous accidents. My advice is to always use your left foot to brake.

Hylton Reid, Glen Waverley

AND ANOTHER THING ...

Guns

US President Donald Trump calling a shooting massacre a mental health issue is surely the first sign of madness ("Latest shooting a problem of mental health, not guns, says President Donald Trump", 7/11).
Graham Cadd, Dromana

If it is mental health, not guns, why does the US have so many mentally ill people, Mr Trump?
Mick Webster, Chiltern

How many victims of gun violence in the US were members of the National Rifle Association or the children of members. Surely it's time for those left behind to reflect and speak up about this national tragedy.
Nathan Feld, Glen Iris

Federal politics

John Howard is a rank amateur when it comes to asylum seekers. The tag team of Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton has made Mr Howard look compassionate.
Dallas Fraser, Currumbin, Qld

It's increasingly hard to reconcile Malcolm Turnbull's earlier notion of having lots of fun with his reality on the ground.
Hugh McCaig, Blackburn

Oliver Yates for PM ("Lib stalwart attacks 'immoral' climate stance", 7/11).
Lauriston Muirhead, Table Top, NSW

Tax

Could the ATO and ACCC please publish a list of businesses that have been avoiding paying their fair share of tax in Australia, or underpaying staff, so that consumers know which businesses to boycott?
Dianne Anderson, Bundoora

With Betty Windsor's fetish for hats, she probably needs to invest in Bermuda and the Caymans to save a few pounds to cover the annual millinery bill.
John Walsh, Watsonia

Finally

The people's Cup? Next, they'll be telling us the grand prix is the people's car race.
Rick Grounds, Mount Waverley

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